The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (33 page)

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.

-38-

We reached the first machine with alarming speed. Our line crashed into theirs and passed them. They were chasing
Potemkin,
and we were flying right into their teeth.

I flipped around and went into a spin.

“Sir?” Kwon shouted. “You okay?”

I controlled the spin with difficulty and zoomed toward the nearest machine.

“We can’t let them get by us, Kwon. They’re going after
Potemkin
. They’ll release their warheads and destroy the ship if they get in close enough.”

Kwon hadn’t taken such drastic action to slow down. He shot past the Macro. As soon as he realized I was going to be tackling it alone, he hit the brakes hard. I heard him grunt in the proximity-chat channel.

I didn’t wait for him before making my approach. I couldn’t afford to. If just one of these machines made it in close and took
Potemkin
out—it was unthinkable. Machines like this one had killed two of my children in the past. I wasn’t about to let them finish my unborn baby as well.

At the last second, as I entered the covering mist that surrounded the machine, I think it knew I was coming. I’d hoped the aerogels and chaff it had floating around it in a nimbus of reflective shielding would keep it from sensing me—but it whirled around turning from the ship that was its target.

Its small maneuvering jets stopped firing. The chassis spun and metal appendages extended.

I’d hoped it wouldn’t simply set off its charge to kill me, and now I knew I’d gambled correctly. I wasn’t a big enough target. Why spend its nuclear payload to kill a few marines? The human ships were its true enemy.

Since we were both now in a fog of multi-hued, semi-gel material, our lasers flared but didn’t reach one another. I thought he might have scored a hit, scarring my belly armor, but all my systems were go. I pressed in close, urging the surfboard under my feet to give me a final push.

I hit him going at about fifty miles an hour, if I had to guess. I had the brains to tuck my chin down so I wouldn’t snap my neck on impact. I rammed a shoulder into the machine’s chassis, and we both went into a spin.

Fighting hand-to-hand in space can be an otherworldly experience. I heard the initial crunching collision through my suit, but afterward I only heard my own harsh breathing, the radio chattering in my ear and the metallic straining sounds of my exoskeleton as I moved.

Both of us reached out metal limbs. Mine were thicker but shorter. Both of us were covered in a generous layer of armor. We latched on, and sparks brightened up our tiny portion of space in relative quiet.

I saw the enemy’s central laser cannon. It was swiveling seeking to get a target on any portion of my armor. I knew that if it burned a hole through my suit, I would depressurize and lose a limb at the very least. I struggled to climb over the machine, to crawl onto its back where the gun couldn’t sight on me.

The Macro seemed to sense my purpose and clamped down with a few of its mantis- like limbs. I heard them sawing on my armor, gouging it. I reached for my laser projector and managed to get it at last. I pressed it against the Macro and burned it. The beam punched through the Macro’s skin and a small puff of plasma came out, but it didn’t stop operating. These machines didn’t die easily.

Those arms—they were winning the struggle. I couldn’t get any leverage. It was one thing to be strong, but it was another thing to be unable to push against anything. I found myself being dragged around back to the belly of the beast. It wanted to get me right on top of its laser and burn me through at point blank range.

I struggled and changed tactics. Instead of trying to burn its guts enough to kill it, I put the head of my laser against its projector and depressed the firing stud. As the tip glowed, my visor dimmed, and after a one-second burst the enemy laser popped. The robot’s primary weapon was useless.

Whooping with triumph, I pushed my laser against its body again and burned new holes in it. After a time, one of the limbs holding me drifted away, limp.

“I have you now,” I said.

Not a second later I regretted those words. A huge weight landed on my back. Another Macro.

I tried to move, but I was pinned.

“Sorry, sir,” Kwon’s voice buzzed loudly in my headset.

My com-link was set to pick up platoon chat, automatically increasing the volume for those that were close at hand. Kwon sounded like he was breathing down my back—because he was.

“Get the hell off me, First Sergeant,” I complained.

“I thought you might need some help, but this one is pretty much dead. Didn’t put up much of a fight, huh?”

“Nah,” I said, as he finally climbed off my back. “It went down easy.

“Disappointing.”

We left our first Macro and rode our surfboards to catch the next one. This time things went more smoothly. We worked together and killed it fast. We launched from that floating metal carcass just in time to see a brilliant flash fill space around us.

Three other silent explosions followed in rapid sequence.

“What the hell was that?” Kwon demanded.

“They self-destructed,” I said, breathing hard. “Dammit, they must have realized we were going to win and changed tactics. Take out as many as you can, that’s their motto.”

“That’s my motto, too,” Kwon said.

“Gaines?” I called over platoon chat. “Give me a head count. How many did we lose?”

No one answered me. Kwon and I drifted in silence for a time while I repeated the message. Finally, I contacted Jasmine.

“Have you got us on your sensors?”

“Yes, Colonel,” she said. “We’ve been tracking you from the beginning. Your suit is losing pressure. It’s a slow leak but potentially fatal. Please return to the ship. We’re coming back to pick you up.”

I hadn’t ordered her to reverse course, but I figured she had a better picture of the overall battle than I did at this point, so I didn’t argue.

“How about the fleet? How many ships did we lose?”

“Forty-eight ships were lost or badly damaged. To keep flying at full speed, we’ll have to abandon a few more.”

“Forty-eight…” I said. “How many were carriers?”

“None, sir. But we did lose three battleships and a dozen cruisers. The rest were small ships, most of them fighters.”

“Not bad,” I said. “Not bad at all!”

Jasmine didn’t say anything. I knew that others often had a lower threshold for losses than I did. In my math, I figured that we’d lost about ten percent of our ships, plus
Phobos
. The big ship was the worst loss. Overall, it had been a bad fight but not a disaster. I still had an effective force, enough to be a credible threat to the Macros. That was what I needed most.

“Jasmine,” I said, “we seem to have lost Major Gaines. Do you have him on track? Or his remains, at least?”

“No sir. We have no transponder from his armor, nothing. His brainbox might be out and his generator dead—if he’s alive at all.”

I knew what she was suggesting. The odds were pretty good that Gaines had been caught up in the midst of one of those nuclear explosions. We all might have died if the enemy hadn’t been spread out to avoid our defensive fire. All the hunter-killer teams of marines were miles apart from each other.

“So the missile attack is over, and they’ve got nothing else coming at us for the time being. Let’s do a little search and rescue.”

Jasmine wasn’t happy about it, and Newcome was even less so, but I held firm. They wanted to run, break out of Neptune’s orbit and flee for Earth. I didn’t want to get too far from the enemy’s main fleet.

“They’re the hounds, and we’re the hares,” I told them as I drifted through space, checking each hunk of cold, dead debris. “The key is to keep them chasing us while our big guns shoot them in the ass. We don’t want to get too far ahead of them. We don’t want the hounds to get bored and wander off.”

“But if they catch us, they’ll chew our backsides off,” Newcome pointed out.

“I’m well aware of that, Admiral. You should see my armor.”

The search continued for another half hour. I was about to give up when I heard a tiny voice in my headset.

“Did you hear something, Kwon?”

“Yeah,” he said. “My belly is growling. When are we going to take a break and get something to eat?”

I squelched his channel and listened again. Stopping my surfboard, I tried to hold my position in space and drift.

My suit hissed. My radio clicked and crackled with background radiation from the massive gas giant below.

Then, I heard it again.

“…mayday…”

I checked my signal finder and pinpointed it. I flew to the position and found a dark spinning object. It looked like a crab going around and around slowly.

I gently touched what looked like a leg. I caught him as gently as I could. The first thing I did was connect my umbilical to his suit, powering it. I was low on oxygen, but I figured I had enough to make it back. I pumped air, heat and power into his suit.

The suit lights glimmered a faint, flickering blue: The color of an officer’s armor.

“Gaines, you shirking bastard,” I said. “I do believe you’ve been absent without leave for damn close to an hour. If I ever catch you smoking weed in the latrine again, I’m busting you down to private, mister.”

“Yes, sir,” he croaked. “Fuck you, sir.”

I smiled and carried him back to the battleship cradled in my arms like a big steel baby.

-39-

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.