The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (32 page)

-36-

A week later
, I was standing on the command deck of
Potemkin
again. We were far out in space, rolling with the gravity swells and trying to look tough. We’d moved without stealth or grace. Wallowing battleships, carriers brimming with fighters and about a thousand smaller vessels trailed behind me—altogether, it was the grandest armada Earth had ever put into the skies.

But it wasn’t going to be enough. Not by a long shot. Marvin had miscalculated. The enemy was now emerging from behind their comets to meet us, flying ahead of their planet-killers. They’d counted our guns and found us contemptible.

They’d thrown far more than the estimated four thousand cruisers at us. They had six thousand cruisers, give or take a few, and had over a hundred dreadnaughts as well—huge ships with point defense weapons and fantastically thick hulls. I recalled that, years back, they’d attacked with just one of these monsters. It had taken all of Earth’s firepower and cunning to bring that single vessel down.

Behind the comets lurked even more ships, including transports. If they had factories, and I assumed they did, they would be hiding there along with thousands of machines built to invade, mine and colonize our worlds with inorganic un-life. If they had their way, the biotic soup of humanity and our supporting ecosystem would be gone forever.

The only solace I had was the drifting stream of balloon-like megahabs behind us. They were still rising through Earth’s clouds and gliding to the Tyche ring. Every day more civilians escaped to colonize Eden. I wished them well and hoped enough of them would survive to rebuild should we fail them.

A klaxon sounded. I flinched out of my reverie.

“What have we got, Jasmine?” I demanded, still looking at the stars.

I don’t know what I’d expected her to say. Maybe something about a false alarm or a coming course adjustment. We’d had a lot of both lately.

“Missiles, sir,” she said. “They’ve launched.”

“So early? Their ships are still out of effective range. The missiles will run out of fuel long before they get here, and we’ll easily dodge them.”

“The ships aren’t launching anything—the comets are.”

I walked over to the command table, frowning. Sure enough, new contacts had appeared: Clouds of them. So many that they looked like a fine mist of roiling pixels.

Staring, I thought about what this meant. I’d assumed the comets were just that—comets. They’d been found in the Oort Cloud and propelled toward our planet like stones thrown across a great distance.

But that view was crumbling now. These weren’t just comets.

“Can they be giant ships of some kind, sir?” Jasmine asked.

Her pretty face was tight and frightened.

“No,” I said, scoffing. “They aren’t
ships!
They might have put some missile bases on them, but that hardly qualifies them as ships. They can’t change course or even accelerate. They’re just ice-balls with a few weapons aboard—I mean, so they have a few missiles, so what?”

She didn’t look relieved. I knew I’d failed to explain away this surprise. She stared at the screens in obvious worry.

Looking around, I saw that all of them had that same, funny look on their faces. It wasn’t exactly fear. I’d say it was more a stunned look of people who’d just realized they’re doomed.

“Do you have any orders, sir?”

“How long until the missiles reach us?”

“About two days. They’re very far out. New data is coming in now. The missiles are larger than normal Macro design.”

“Damn it,” I muttered. “Who’s giving them new ideas? I don’t think they could come up with this kind of thing on their own. It’s just too different from their traditional path. Remember the Macros that would just roll into a mine field, blowing up one after another without changing course? Those bastards were scary enough—I’m feeling nostalgic for the dumb robots from the good old days.”

Newcome eyed me. “Perhaps they’re smarter because there are so many more of them in this fleet.”

“Hmm,” I said. This idea made sense, but I didn’t like it. I heaved a sigh. “Call up the reserves,” I said.

Jasmine looked at me. “Already?”

I stared at the developing situation on the boards. The plan was simple, we were supposed to divert the enemy at our system’s edge toward the planets. Then, we would surprise them with moon bases firing on them from long range. They’d be faced with a choice at that point: They could either charge after our fleet while being pounded on their flanks, or they could turn on the bases and try to dig them up, one by one.

But the additional ships changed things. We’d already been faced with too many cruisers to begin with. Now that the comets were in the game, acting like missile platforms, at the very least, we were truly outgunned.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure. Call them out. Launch all the marines we have in transports. Fill every assault ship and regular transport—everything except for the megahabs. Then, send them out here. We’re going to have to throw troops at them.”

Newcome sidled up. “Colonel? Those troops were to protect Earth from invaders, were they not?”

“Of course they were.”

“I’m just mentioning that, since the local governments have made it very clear they require guardians in case—”

“Don’t you think I know that, man?” I demanded. “Earth’s local government isn’t going to matter. We’d placed ground forces on Earth to mop up anything that got past us and managed to land. I don’t care about that any longer. I need to win this battle in space. If their entire fleet defeats ours, and our moon bases, it won’t save a single life to have our ground forces on the planet.”

Newcome stepped away from me. He didn’t meet my eye, and I figured that was probably for the best.

The battle crawled for the next forty hours or so. I tried to sleep and only managed to do so in fits and starts. The Earth government types sent me whining messages, naturally. Every dignitary wanted a color guard of Star Force marines to cover their asses back on Earth, but that just wasn’t going to happen this time.

Every transport we had lifted off from their bases. Andros Island was virtually empty. Altogether, two hundred thousand men were suited up and sent into the skies.

That might not sound like a lot of troops, and compared to other great wars, it wasn’t.  In World War Two more men had sometimes been deployed to take a single Pacific island. But out in space, each man cost us a lot to put into place. We had to suit him up, train him, arm him with our best equipment, then fly his ass all the way out from Earth to the cold, dark edge of deep space. Each marine in a battle suit was as expensive to produce and get into action as a jet pilot might have been in the old days—including the cost of the jet.

I planned to use my marines like jet pilots, too. They were astronauts with bombs, piloting one-man spacesuits, each of which was more deadly than any aircraft from the previous century. Viewed as two hundred thousand small spacecraft, the troops would be a substantial addition to my forces.

I had my main force retreat, heading sunward. We passed Pluto and headed toward Neptune, which happened to be more or less in line with our route back toward Earth. I wanted to mass up with the extra transports before we fought the enemy.

It was humiliating. We hadn’t fired a weapon yet, and we were already in full flight.

“Let’s angle around Neptune in a decelerating arc,” I said, talking to the navigational people.

“We’ll barely reach Neptune’s orbit before the missiles reach us,” Jasmine told me. “I’m surprised we don’t just stand and shoot them down.”

“We have to assume the worst.”

She met my eyes and frowned. “You mean…that we can’t shoot them down?”

“Remember the last time they unloaded a lot of missiles in our direction at long range?” I asked. “Each of them turned out to be carrying Macro assault troops.”

“Right, that could be the case here—but so many?”

“We can’t afford to make mistakes now,” I said.

I could tell by her expression that my words seemed unfamiliar to her. She was accustomed to a different Kyle Riggs, one full of bravado and self-assurance. Maybe I’d changed. Maybe these damned machines had me rattled. I hated to admit it, but it was a possibility. The stakes were incredibly high.

We ended up making it to Neptune before the Macro missiles reached us. I ordered the bases there on the local moons
not
to fire. Their weaponry wasn’t much good against small targets, anyway.

Instead, I rolled into battle the one other surprise I had in store for the Macros—
Phobos
. They’d never met her in open combat before, at least not with a ship that had lived long enough to pass on any data concerning the vessel’s capabilities.

It was spherical and resembled a rogue asteroid at first glance. What gave it away as artificial was its navigational ability and its surface, which was too regular and spherical to be naturally formed. You could identify the actual
Phobos by its lopsided, misshapen surface.

For armament, our
Phobos
had only one weapon with two primary modes: It could reach out a great distance and crush a single target, or it could generate a pulsing field that smashed every small object that came too close. It was this latter ability I wanted to employ now.

I put the ship directly between my retreating fleet and the incoming barrage of missiles. We watched tensely to see if the Macros took the bait.

In typical fashion, the missiles ignored the giant ship. They glided past, adjusting their courses just enough to skim the surface. Their payloads were intended for much richer targets.

“Tell Captain Zhou she can fire at will,” I said.

Jasmine’s finger didn’t even reach the command table to hail the captain before
Phobos’
field was activated. Apparently, Zhou had ordered the defensive field to activate on her own initiative. I thought she’d done it a fraction early—but then, I wasn’t the one watching thousands of missiles buzz my hull.

The effects were dramatic. A shockwave burst from the ship, shown on the screens with a bluish ring that puffed away from
Phobos
like a pulse of electrical power. The missiles were crushed instantly, turning into chunks of debris. Most of them didn’t even explode. They were simply wadded up like paper.

A scattering of applause went up on the command deck, but I didn’t join in. They’d destroyed about a thousand missiles, but that was only a small percentage.

At first, the Macro missiles didn’t seem to comprehend the danger. The missiles kept flying on their original courses, buzzing over
Phobos
. My jaws ached from gritting my teeth.

“Come on, come on Zhou,” I muttered under my breath. I wanted the ship to fire again. I knew it couldn’t—not immediately.

When we’d originally gained control of
Phobos
, there’d been a full ten minute span between the first gravity pulse and the next. We’d improved upon that, but we still had to wait several minutes between discharges.

Those were very long minutes. By the time the second pulse went off, an estimated seven hundred missiles had slipped past the hull.

The second discharge, however, was even more impressive than the first. I think they’d done some adjusting, and the missile swarm was at its thickest point.

“Look at that, sir,” Jasmine said excitedly. “Twenty-one hundred kills and counting!”

I dared to smile. We’d wiped out a majority of the enemy barrage, and they still hadn’t laid a finger on us. Unfortunately, that was about to change.

“Sir…I…”

I shouldn’t have looked, but I did. The missiles were changing course. They were no longer skimming over
Phobos
. Macro Command had come to the belated conclusion that the small moon was a ship and was somehow destroying their missiles. They reacted the way all Macros did—like angry insects. They attacked the big ship despite the absurd size difference.

Not every missile slammed into
Phobos’
hull—but most of them did. They kept coming and coming. Fiery flashes ignited in a blinding series, too fast for the eye to follow. It reminded me of a summer fireworks finale. Dust began to rise from
Phobos’
wounded side.

“She can’t take that kind of beating!” I shouted. “All ships ahead full, flank speed. Let’s see if we can—”

We were too little, too late. The giant ship, the pride of our fleet, the captured alien vessel we couldn’t begin to construct on our own, exploded in a cascading sheet of flame. The interior was pressurized, and the released gases and fuels went up all at once. There couldn’t be any survivors.

Phobos
was no longer a ship, she was a falling star. We stared at our screens, aghast. There were still missiles coming toward us—not many, but enough to be a danger. And our flagship had been blown out of space.

-37-

“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.