The Dead Sun(Star Force Series #9)

-42-



“We demand you comply with our stated agreement,” Macro Command said.

This made my lips twitch with a moment of amusement.

“You called me, Macro Command. As you may or may not be aware, we’re fighting a battle right now. Unless you wish to surrender, we have nothing to discuss.”

“Offer accepted.”

I frowned. What the hell were they talking about? Then all of a sudden, I got it.

“Wait a minute, you can’t just surrender,” I found myself saying. Even to me, it sounded like an absurd statement. I’d been taken by surprise.

“That is precisely what we’re doing. We’re entitled to this privilege due to our prior agreements with Colonel Kyle Riggs.”

“What agreement…oh,” I said, thinking it over. I had, after all, told them in the dead sun system that I would let the last few of them live if I won. I’d even sold it to them as an insurance policy. Well, now the Macros were making a claim against that policy.

A beeping sounded in my helmet. It was Jasmine, so I muted the Macros.

“Colonel, the enemy ships are slowing down. They seem to have all lost power at once.”

“Are you still firing on them?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I gritted my teeth in frustration. Of course my fleet was still firing. To even question this was absurd. What did you do when faced with genocidal robots on the run? Why, you blasted them until the last nut fell off the last bolt.

“Cease fire,” I ordered. “I have to think this over.”

“Cease fire? I’m asking for confirmation, Colonel. You want us to stop firing on the Macros?”

“That’s right,” I said. “They’re surrendering.”

“Don’t buy into any of their tricks, Kyle,” she said. “They’re only doing this to gain time. They’ll kill us all the moment they can. They’ll cheat on any—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Riggs out.”

I unmuted the Macros. They were in the middle of lodging a complaint. I’d missed half of it, apparently.

“—despite the clarity of the agreement reached, your non-compliance—”

“We’ve stopped firing,” I said.

“Excellent. We require your aid. Many of our ships are damaged. Attend to us immediately.”

I began thinking fast. What had I told them exactly…? That when the end came, I would stay my hand, and I wouldn’t take the last of them out. I would spare the last Macros.

My fighters quickly closed in on them. I ordered my swarming wingmen to slow down and hold their fire. There were plenty of complaints from the pilots, and every CAG in the fleet wanted to scream in my ear personally. I put them all on hold.

I couldn’t blame them for being upset. We’d just seen these robots drop bombs on our homeworld. How many millions had died? We didn’t even know yet. But despite all that, my Star Force people were disciplined. They held their fire. I knew that if I’d had Worms or Centaurs for pilots, I couldn’t have stopped them with just words.

“Macro Command,” I said, reopening our channel. “I require you to answer questions in order to survive as free entities.”

There ensued a few moments of quiet. “Unacceptable,” the response came at last.

“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to accept things you don’t like to hear,” I told them. “That is the essence of surrender.”

“This stipulation wasn’t in the original agreement.”

“Lots of things are in the small print. Deals like these are meant to be manipulated and distorted. For example, the time you allowed the Centaurs to live in space but destroyed their populations on the surface of their worlds. Or the deal you made with the Worms not to attack them and then followed up by having Star Force marines attack them as your proxies.”

“The circumstances in the instances you cite were different,” they said.

“How so?”

“In those situations, we were in control.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a friendly laugh.

“Fine, okay. Prepare to defend yourselves. We’re coming in to wipe out your last…thirty-nine ships? This won’t take long at all.”

Another short delay, then: “Demand accepted.”

“All right then. First of all, who created the Macros? Who unleashed your plague upon the cosmos?”

“Your words comprise two questions.”

“Yes, you’re good at counting. Now, answer or be destroyed.”

“Our artificial species was created originally by the beings you refer to as the ‘Blues’.”

I nodded grimly. This wasn’t really news to me, but I’d long wanted confirmation.

“What was the nature of your original programming?” I asked. “What was your goal?”

Internally, I was enjoying this experience. As far as I knew, no one had ever managed to get the Macros to respond to questioning. I had the Macros on their knees. I knew these final ships had to be very important to them. In every other instance like this one in the past, they’d willingly sacrificed themselves without a qualm. This time was different. I figured they didn’t have much left and couldn’t afford to lose this handful of ships.

“We were programmed to explore, to identify other intelligent life and to destroy it wherever it was found.”

I had difficulty breathing. All that the Blues had told me—everything was a lie. They’d launched these nightmares into the universe on purpose. And then they’d launched the Nanos afterward. Why? Maybe they’d come to fear the Macros, to realize that they were too strong. They’d sent them out, not to help the biotics they’d ordered exterminated, not exactly, but to help counter the Macros which they’d begun to fear.


“That answers a lot of questions,” I said. “You were the first artificial slaves the Blues created. Do you still serve them?”

“No.”

“But would you ever attack them?”

“To do so would be a breach in our programming. We’ve been working on the problem for several years with no final solution yet.”

I thought about that. At first, it sounded like they were trying to break their own programming. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize what the Macros really meant. They were trying to circumvent their own programming just as they’d done many times after making agreements with other biotics. They wanted to destroy the Blues, but couldn’t do it directly. They’d been working on alternate approaches, just as they had with Star Force originally. This line of reasoning brought me to a fresh idea.

“Macro Command,” I said, frowning. “Did you intend for Star Force to attack the Blues?”

“Yes.”

That was a stab in the gut for me. I’d always thought of these machines as big, powerful and dumb. But perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe in their own way, they were pretty cagey bastards. After all, hadn’t Star Force bombed the Blues? Hadn’t the Blues launched a ship seeking revenge against us, which we’d then captured after significant losses? They’d engineered a war between us, talking to both sides and poking us with sticks. The Blues were an enemy, but they weren’t as committed as the Macros.

The trickery and innate evil of these machines was getting to me. They were implacable and unstoppable through diplomatic means. I knew they’d supposedly “surrendered” to me now, but I felt sure they were already working on a “solution” to that problem, too.

“Macro Command,” I said. “I only have one more question for you: are there surviving members of your artificial species on the dark sun half a light year from here?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. When we find those last machines, we’ll capture them and put them in a zoo. Our truce is now at an end. Riggs out.”

I connected to the general command override, and gave the order to destroy the machines utterly. The fighter jocks whooped with joy. They roared in, jets blazing. We fired and took out their engines first. Once they were helpless, we spun around and stitched their hulls with glowing hot hits from our lasers. We melted their hulls and took them out one by one.

They tried to fight back. We lost a few men, but it was worth it to be free of their evil presence for all time.

When the last ship, running for all it was worth, tried to open a channel with me, I finally relented and took the call.

“Colonel Kyle Riggs,” the voice said, “we demand that you comply with our agreement.”

“Request denied!” I snapped.

“Colonel Kyle Riggs, destroyer of worlds. You have broken your programming. We will never honor our programming with your species again.”

I laughed.

“I changed the deal, that’s all,” I said. “I found a solution to the problem. You’re not the last of your kind; therefore I can safely destroy you.”

“The last question…yes, we see your logic, but we do not approve.”

“Yeah well, sue me.”

During these final words, I’d been bearing down on the last running cruiser. I hammered the hull and grinned tightly as internal heat leaked from the radioactive core. We’d breached the Macro ship’s hull, and I knew she was doomed.

When the big ship blew up, I had to veer violently to stay out of the expanding debris. I went into a wild spin. I laughed and roared at the same time. I held onto consciousness long enough to get my fighter under control again, but just barely.

I was proud of myself. I’d weaseled on a deal with the Macros even as they’d weaseled on a dozen deals with Earth and others. I considered this a personal achievement.