The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (10 page)

“What device?”

“A gravitational manipulator. A smaller version of the system
Phobos
uses for propulsion and weaponry.”

Of the tech we’d discovered and purloined, gravitational control systems were among the most amazing. The Blues were the experts at this, and they’d built a moon-sized ship that flew using a gravity-manipulating drive. We’d stolen the ship, made it our own, and called it
Phobos
.

I scratched my chin. “Well, it does sound like he’s got a good reason,” I had to admit. “Put him on screen.”

“He’s not in local space, Colonel.”

“I know that. But wherever he is, there’s a camera. Let’s see him.”

It took her a few minutes, but we soon had him on the big display. Marvin was zooming around in his fighter, making gut-wrenching turns and sliding stops.

“He’s buzzing around like a bee in a greenhouse,” I said, chuckling.

“He does seem to be happy, sir.”

“All right, Marvin,” I said, unmuting the blinking channel again. “You can keep your fighter and fly it yourself but no strapping any engines directly to your chassis!”

“I wouldn’t think of it, Colonel Riggs.”

Time passed. Every day I watched chunks of rock flowing into orbit near us. It was disconcerting seeing the flying stream of debris. It reminded me of being in the path of an automatic pitching machine only, in this case, the balls were the size of buildings, and they were flying at around a hundred thousand miles a minute.

Still, he managed to use gravitational systems to accelerate and decelerate each chunk. When they got to our orbital position, he began assembling them into a massive cylindrical structure.

I frowned as this monolithic thing that grew up outside my windows. With each day that passed, I couldn’t help but be awed and worried by it at the same time.

“Jasmine,” I said one fine morning as we sipped coffee and stared at the growing structure, “Tell me if I’m wrong, but that doesn’t look like anything a human would build in space, does it?”

She shook her head. We both went back to staring. Marvin was creating an alien structure. A sphere of black, swirling stone mixed with metal in an almost organic pattern.

What had I set into motion? I’d expected maybe a smaller version of a ring, but this thing…? What the hell did it do?

I demanded a face to face meeting with Marvin the next day. He complained bitterly, not wanting to pause in his work. I knew he’d been working around the clock without a break, and he was totally obsessed.

When I threatened to clip his wings and take away his fighter, he finally came to heel.

“Colonel Riggs,” he said as he walked onto the bridge, “What is so critically important it can’t be done virtually?”

I gave him a quick, visual inspection. His body looked remarkably like the version I’d originally approved of and allowed out into space. But I knew better.

“Jasmine,” I said, “play the vid.”

She tapped the screen and, on the holotank, an image of Marvin flickered into being. It showed him as he had been less than an hour ago, fully decked out with ten extra cameras and two clusters of tentacles that drifted in the vacuum of space.

“Looks like a couple of sea anemones somehow attached themselves to your chassis, Marvin,” I said. “Where are those clusters of appendages? Did you leave them in the fighter?”

“Those are not technically appendages, Colonel Riggs. My primary form is exactly as you see before you, approved and certified.”

I scoffed. “Come on, Marvin, we’ve got you on video.”

“Oh,” he said, as if noticing the video for the first time. “I see clearly the source of confusion on your part. That is not my body you’re seeing. Those are tools—work clothes, if you will. Just as a human needs tools to perform construction, I designed external components I could add to my structure temporarily to enhance my performance.”

I laughed. Jasmine scowled.

“I get it,” I said. “I told you there can’t be any altering of your form. So, to circumvent that command, you built whatever you wanted as a ‘tool’ which would allow you to claim it wasn’t part of your actual body. Very clever, Marvin.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“How close are you to finishing this semi-organic-looking cylinder-thing?”

“It’s finished now.”

Jasmine and I stared at him for a second. “What?”

“The project is completed. We’re ready to proceed to the next step, but we haven’t yet accumulated sufficient mass.”

“Is that why more chunks keep coming into orbit here?”

“Precisely.”

“Why do you need so much mass?”

“How else do you propose to create compressed matter? You must have a source of uncompressed matter, then compress it. Stardust is extremely dense, collapsed material, and it requires a great deal of mass and energy to create it. I propose to perform the task artificially with gravity we’ve generated and controlled.”

Jasmine spoke up then. She had her own reasons for demanding he come to us and report in.

“Marvin,” she said, “I’ve done the calculations. All the smaller moons in the gas giant’s gravity-well do not make up enough mass to equal what you’ve already transported here into orbit. How is this possible?”

“First, let me praise your mathematical prowess, Captain Sarin. However, you are wrong in this instance.”

“What do you mean, wrong?”

“All the mass I’ve transported to orbit the white dwarf star, Loki, comes from the orbit of the gas giant.”

We both frowned at him. “But if the total mass of the asteroids is less than what you’ve sent…” I paused, and then I had a terrible thought. “Marvin, are you mining the primary moons?”

“Of course I am, Colonel Riggs. The conclusion is inescapable, isn’t it?”

“Those were habitable worlds, not just rocks in the sky!”

“The difference is negligible in this instance as they are no longer habitable worlds.”

“But Marvin,” said Jasmine in a sad, worried voice, “the Crustaceans dream of returning to their homes and rebuilding someday.”

“That is an unreasonable fantasy. Firstly, the radiation on the moons in question will not fade to a non-lethal level for thousands of years. Secondly, there will be large portions of the moons missing by that time as my project has removed them.”

We stopped asking questions then because we didn’t know quite what else to say. I considered ordering Marvin to stop chewing up the Crustacean moons, but I knew there wasn’t any other source of material we could easily access. The system didn’t have an asteroid belt, and the gas giant itself was too huge and not solid enough to mine into chunks.

I went to the big window and watched jagged lumps of matter fly by at blurring speeds. What would the Crustaceans say if they knew what we were doing out here?

I turned back to Marvin. “I want you to mine only one of the three moons. Pick the one that’s most suitable, and leave the other two alone.”

“That will delay my schedule, sir. Once the initial crust of the moon is stripped away, the magma underneath is far less suitable as it—”

“I don’t care. Do it my way or forget it.”

He craned his cameras and eyed me quietly for a time. I knew he was gauging my mood and looking for any sign of weakness.

I must have looked resolute because at last he said: “It will be done your way, Colonel Riggs.”

Then he left, and I felt more disturbed than ever by what we were doing out here.

-10-

A month passed. During that time, most of the surface of Harvard, one of the three extinct moons circling the gas giant, had been stripped away. The planetary mass, once roughly the size of Earth, had been reduced by approximately four percent. That might not sound like a lot, but I was pretty sure the Crustaceans were going to notice if they ever got out this way again.

“Marvin,” I said on my next daily call, “Give me a status report, please.”

“We’re ready to move to the next phase, Colonel Riggs.”

“Really? And what phase is that? Are we going to chew up a fresh world? Or maybe you’d like us to steer a couple of comets into orbit around this star.”

“That will be unnecessary and a waste of time. A comet, in particular, would be unhelpful. At this relative proximity to a stellar body, the heat and radiation would quickly vaporize the entire—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “I know. It was a sarcastic comment. What is the next phase?”

“Testing.”

I paused, and my face brightened. “Testing? That does sound positive. How do we do it?”

“The unit is ready to transmit—but I’m unsure as to the precise nature of the
final results.”

“What do you mean, ‘unsure’? Are you ready or not?”

“In a manner of speaking, yes, I am.”

Jasmine tapped my arm. I turned on her in irritation. Wearing lead underpants for many long weeks had made us all touchy—except for Jasmine herself, that is. She was as cool, professional and unperturbed as usual. Even the heat of the “double blaze” period didn’t bother her much. Every nine days, our orbit led us into a position where we were between both of the stars: the big red one and the white dwarf. Hit from both sides with every ounce of radiation the two furnaces could put out, our cooling systems were always overloaded. We called these unpleasant hours the “double blaze”.

Right now, we were in the worst of it. The temperature had to be more than a hundred degrees in my suit, and the internal temperature of the ship was around a hundred and fifty. You had to put your food into a cooling chamber just to slide it into your helmet and eat it.

“What do you want, Captain?” I asked her.

“Ask him about the generators. Where are they?”

“That’s right. Marvin? We’ve been observing your engineering. We understand the incubator—that cylindrical thing; and we understand the compressed matter it’s been pumping out. Star-dust, you call it. But aren’t you going to need more generators? What’s going to power this communication device when you have it ready?”

“That is an insightful question, Colonel Riggs. Inspect any of the rings, and you’ll find they do not have power emissions. The trick is that the power was utilized in their creation. They are linked through entanglement properties across time and space. They are, in a sense, occupying the same location in a different dimension. Therefore, applying resonance to one causes the other to resonate.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. But you said we’d send a transmission like a directional beacon. How can you do that without a power supply?”

“I have plenty of power. Distance isn’t a factor when the two devices are entangled.”

“Hmm,” I said, looking at Jasmine. She was listening in, and she shrugged at the explanation. “I sure hope you know what the hell you’re doing because we don’t.”

“Are you ready to proceed with the test?” Marvin asked.

I looked around my staff. They gave me “why not” type gestures.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But can’t it wait until we’re out of the double-blaze period? We’re hot and uncomfortable here.”

“Unfortunately, no. The gravitational forces required use solar energy, and the collectors are operating at their peak during this time period.”

“Right. Okay, let’s go.”

“Excellent! I’ll launch the probe immediately.”

We all stood around the command system, not quite sure if we were going to see anything interesting. We got quite a surprise.

A blue streak appeared, curving away in an arc from our location and stretching off into space.

“What the heck is that?” I demanded. “Jasmine, why are you putting that bright trailing graphic on—whatever that is?”

“I’m not, sir,” she said. “The image you see is real. At least—according to our sensors it is. It’s burning white-hot, about seven thousand degrees Kelvin.”

“Seven thousand K? Isn’t that around the surface temperature of Sol?”

“It is a little hotter, actually.”

I muttered curses. “Where’s it going? Is it physical or is it an emission?”

“It’s a little of both, I think. The arc—sir, we’ve plotted a course. The anomaly is heading for the ring out of the Thor System.”

“Marvin!” I roared. “What’s happening?”

“Excuse me, Colonel Riggs. I’m having difficulties.”

“This isn’t a test,” I said. “You launched the probe, didn’t you?”

There was a pause, during which I watched the silver arc of brilliant light stretch a quarter of the way around the white dwarf star. It broke orbit and began to straighten out, heading toward the far reaches of the star system.

“I have good news and bad news,” Marvin said after a moment. “The system misfired. It is a prototype, after all.”

“What’s the good news?”

“Why, that
is
the good news,” he said as if surprised. “It works, and it is transmitting.”

“Well, shut it off, we’re not ready. The battle group isn’t poised for a response.”

“But sir, I’ll have to start over again.”

I frowned. “Start over? How long will it take to rebuild the probe?”

“Not just the probe, but the receiver will have to be reconstructed as well. We’ll have to move on to a second moon—there’s no choice there. I’m down to magma all over Harvard.”

I heaved a sigh. Internally, I knew he was probably manipulating me. Marvin was all about doing what he wanted and asking forgiveness later rather than for permission now. That way, no one ever got the chance to tell him “no”. The only option you ever had with Marvin was to decide if today was the day you shut him down permanently.

“Proceed with the test,” I said.

“A wise choice, Colonel Riggs.”

“Don’t rub it in, robot.”

“An unclear reference. Comment ignored.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and muted the channel.

“Well,” I said, looking around at my stunned staff. “It is time to get our ships moving.”

“Where are we going, sir?” Jasmine asked.

“To the border ring. We have to set up there in case the Macros do come through.”

“And if they do?”

“Then,” I said, “We blast every one of them out of space until they stop coming or we’re all dead.”

That comment kicked people into gear. Being on station here in stellar orbit had been like living in an endless, boring sauna for months. Everything had suddenly changed.

In a way, I welcomed it. It had been too long since I’d felt my adrenaline pumping. I watched as our ships scrambled away from the gravity tug of the white dwarf star and began to follow the streak of light toward the ring.

“We’re way behind,” I complained an hour later. “That thing must be approaching the speed of light by now.”

“It’s about seventy percent of the way there, Colonel,” Jasmine confirmed. With a dozen deft taps of her fingers, she brought up speed and course data, which now floated beside the streaking probe.

“How the hell did he get that thing to move so fast?”

“Looking at the reports, it appears he built a small platform from eight fighters. I’d guess he stripped the engines and left nothing but a frame holding them together.”

I nodded. “Eight fighter engines tied together and launched as a single unit. Yeah, that would give a small ship a pretty good acceleration curve. But there are fuel limitations.”

“Not if you aren’t planning to slow down,” Jasmine said thoughtfully. “The device will streak through space from here to the other side of that ring singing its simple tone. Then it will probably be destroyed. The question is: Can we receive the signal for enough time to get a fix on its location?”

The more I thought about it over the following two hours the more I wondered if this had been such a great idea. Already, I’d wrecked the surface of a formerly habitable world, and now we were about to poke a pin into the Macros. Even if we did learn where the star system on the far side was, how was it going to help us? The only effective way to get there was through that ring. We’d known that before we started chasing the probe. The only positive thing about the chase was that it got us out of the heat and radiation we’d been suffering through for so long. I stripped off the outer suit, took a shower, and left my helmet on my desk. I returned to the command table rubbing my neck.

“Your hair is still wet,” Jasmine told me quietly.

“I know,” I said, “it feels great. It’s cooling me down. I think I need two or three days of cooling down.”

Jasmine gave me a small smile.

“Why don’t you go take a shower?” I suggested. “I can man the helm.”

She took me up on it immediately. I halfway wanted to chase after her, but the probe was only about an hour out from the ring now, and I figured there just wasn’t time. At the very least, the entire command staff would notice. I didn’t want to be whispered about as the guy who couldn’t keep his hands off his girlfriend even in the middle of a crisis. I’d had that label before, and I’d never worn it comfortably.

After she left, I sent people off in turns to clean up. They came back with fresh suits and smiles. Nothing gets quite as nasty inside as a spacesuit you’ve been living in for weeks—especially when it’s a
hot
spacesuit.

All too soon, the probe closed in on the ring. We were hours behind it, but my command staff and I had come up with a game plan by then.

“Decelerate, four Gs,” I ordered. “We’ve got to slow down if we don’t want to plunge right through after it—or overshoot it.”

We turned around to aim our jets in the direction of our travel and the ship shook under us. The G forces were painful even to nanotized people. I didn’t want to be flying right into the teeth of the enemy if they did come popping out.

“Do you think we should alert Earth?” Newcome asked me. He was back on the command deck, and his face was all pink and white.

“Yes,” I said. “Tell them we’ve launched the probe. Don’t mention anything about doing so early. Let’s keep our dignity on this one.”

“And the fighters…sir?” Newcome pressed.

“You want to send them in there now? To screen us? Forget it. If we fight, we’ll do so as a single fist. I’m not burning pilots to save our butts if this goes badly. Speaking of which, where the hell is Marvin?”

“Why—he’s aboard
Potemkin
, sir,” Jasmine said. “I thought you knew.”

“He’s aboard this ship? Since when?”

“He boarded moments after the probe was launched.”

I nodded sourly. “He hasn’t shown his nose up here on the bridge because he knows I’m going to bitch at him. Get him up here. This is his firecracker, and he’s going to watch it go off with the rest of us.”

I knew Marvin preferred to “watch” events like this via the com network. He had direct access to all the data flowing in from the computers and sensors so he could read it anywhere. We had to have that data processed then displayed visually on our command table and holotank. That was a redundant step for Marvin.

“He’s telling me his presence here isn’t necessary or productive, sir,” Jasmine said.

I could tell she was as annoyed as was I.

“Patch that channel to me,” I snapped.

When she did so, I roared into it. “Marvin, drag your conniving butt onto my bridge, or I’ll blow up that probe right now.”

“I’m not sure Star Force currently has the capacity to enact such a threat—”

“Yeah? You want to risk it?”

Apparently, he didn’t. The door to the main passageway dilated open immediately, and Marvin stepped through. He clunked on stubby feet again. He’d done another quick-change shedding his “external toolset” to leave him in the state he’d been restricted to.

I had to take it as positive news that Marvin was at least aboard the ship and marginally cooperating with my commands. If he’d thought we were about to be destroyed, he’d have already bailed out on us by now.

“Let’s just see what you’ve done for us today,” I said, waving toward the console.

With ill grace, Marvin quietly took his spot at the command table. We all watched tensely as the point of no return was reached and exceeded.

The position of the probe on the screen was just conjecture now. It was moving too fast to get a fix on it by traditional methods. We could only plot its course and imagine where it was. We were about five light-minutes behind it, and the distance was growing as we decelerated, and it continued to streak toward the goal.

“There isn’t going to be much time for a blip of data if this thing goes through and smashes into a solid obstacle,” I said. “Why don’t you slow it down, Marvin?”