The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (37 page)

-44-

A mixture of celebrations and riots continued to sweep around the globe due to my coronation. The vids played the pageantry over and over without a break. Every secret imperialist on the planet was overjoyed. Every individualist who wanted a return to the old ways of a hundred fifty separate states cried in their collective soups.

I contacted Miklos shortly after I returned home.

“Miklos, old buddy,” I said when he came on the line.

“Is this a social call, Colonel—excuse me—
Emperor?
” he asked.

His voice was as cold as ice. I knew why, of course. I’d done exactly what he’d feared I would do.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Give me an update. Is that fire in the Arctic Ocean out yet?”

“Yes
, Your Highness, it has subsided.”

“What about the death count? Any updates there?”

“I’m happy to report I overestimated the loss of life. We suffered a mere one hundred thirty-one million causalities—Your Highness.”

“That’s good, but please stop calling me that,” I said.

“What? ‘Your Highness?’”

We glared at one another for a second via our screens.

“Look,” I said finally. “This isn’t going to end the way you think it will. I took power so I could do something—something that has to be done.”

He looked confused for a second and tilted his head.

“Is that a threat, sir?”

“Far from it. Watch the news, Miklos. Watch the news.”

I closed the channel then and stood up. I headed downstairs, winding some forty empty floors to the ground floor. The palace was almost empty. It was one of Crow’s buildings—one of the few I hadn’t leveled when I’d returned to Earth. Sitting near Boston, Massachusetts, I found I liked the place even if it was a bit gaudy and drafty in the winter months.

At the ground floor,
I paused but didn’t stop descending. There were no elevators into the lower regions where I was headed now. I pressed onward, winding down into the depths of the Earth.

At the bottom of the massive labyrinth, I entered a secret room. All of Crow’s palaces had secret rooms. I doubt anyone alive knew where they all were.

Inside the room, I kept a battle suit. I put it on and summoned transport. Then I returned to the ground floor, terrorizing my staff, who fled before me. Ignoring them, I headed out into the courtyard, waved back my guards and dismissed the pilot. I flew the shuttle alone up into space. No one questioned me. No one dared.

Admiral Newcome was waiting in orbit aboard
Potemkin
. His eyes were wide and scared. I saw he hadn’t properly combed his white tufts of hair today, and they stuck out from under his cap like cotton balls.

“Let’s get underway, Admiral,” I told him.

He licked his lips, hesitating.

“Are you sure you want to do this, Emperor?”

“No,” I admitted. “But some things have to be done when you have the window of opportunity.”

He nodded, and we left orbit. Marvin was with me and so was Gaines. The rest of the crew had been hand-picked. I’d left Kwon and Jasmine behind. They wouldn’t have understood this mission.

When we reached the target, I brought Marvin to the bridge before I dumped our payload.

“Emperor Riggs?” he asked. “Is there a difficulty?”

“Yeah, there’re lots of them. But they’re all inside my head. I just wanted to confirm some things with you, robot.”

“Robot again? A pejorative term? Under these circumstances, I would think—”

“Well, you thought wrong,” I told him. “Did you check and arm the bombs?”

“Yes.”

“Personally?”

“Yes. I assembled them with my own tentacles, sir. They will go off at the predetermined depth as we discussed. If all is ready—”

I raised my hand to stop him.

“Hold on,” I said. “I didn’t say I wanted to strike at a certain depth. I want to hit the solid core. Was that somehow unclear?”

Marvin’s cameras writhed, struggling to read my posture and expression.

“That’s difficult to determine, sir.”

“Come on, robot. Can you do it or not? A simple pressure switch at the base of the bomb should do the trick. Just like dropping a dumb bomb on a field. If it hits something solid, it goes off.”

“The circumstances are different here. The composition of the planet is not so clear-cut, and the layers are not so distinct. Unlike rocky worlds with gaseous atmospheres, this planet has many varied strata. In the upper layers, the gases are thin. As you go deeper, they become increasingly dense until they become liquid. After that, eventually, a core may be reached. We’ve never probed so deeply.”

I glared at him. Why did Marvin have to make things complicated? I was already having doubts about this entire venture, and he wasn’t making it any easier on me.

“I want to make sure there are minimal civilian casualties,” I told him. “I thought I made that perfectly clear.”

“A noble, if uncontrollable, goal.”

“Why is it uncontrollable?”

“Primarily because we don’t know where their population concentrations are.”

I heaved a sigh. He was right, of course. We didn’t know all that much about them.

“Perhaps,” said Newcome gently, “we could reconsider this action. If we—”

I turned on
him. “Don’t you think I have? I’ve gone over and over it. I don’t see another way. This is the hard moment, Newcome, the moment when we earn our pay. The moment when we do things we’ll never go home and brag about to our kids.”

“My humblest apologies, Emperor.”

I turned back to Marvin. “So, you can’t be dead certain we’ll be hitting the core?”

“I can,” he said, “but only if we risk the success of the project.”

“What do you mean?”

“The bombs will take a long time to fall all the way down. As the liquid becomes denser at the center, it will be harder to distinguish that density from a solid. At sufficient velocity, a liquid registers like a hard surface. To compensate, we could slow down the rate of descent, which would be the only way to be certain a solid surface had been encountered. Unfortunately, taking too long to reach the core would give the enemy time to enact countermeasures. Our odds of failure increase steadily with each hour, once the devices are released into the atmosphere.”

I knew what he was talking about. This wasn’t going to be like dropping charges into water from space. First, they had to go through an atmosphere then penetrate an increasingly dense sea. At the very bottom was firm ground but at what depth? We didn’t know.

But
at the same time I now understood the real reason for his objections.

“Ah-ha!” I shouted, jabbing a finger at him. “That’s it, isn’t it?
Mission failure. That’s the real reason you’re hemming and hawing.”

“Reference unclear—and insulting.”

“Damn straight, it is. You don’t want the enemy to defuse these bombs you’ve worked so hard on. That’s it, isn’t it?”

“The project would be seriously jeopardized if the bombs don’t go off. Additionally, if we fail in this initial attempt, the enemy will be forewarned. I would recommend—”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I’ve heard enough. Set them to go off when they touch rock. There has to be a solid core.  Quit bullshitting me.
Phobos
was built out of rock. Where do you think they got it?”

“To be clear, you wish me to commence the attack?”

“What? Am I the only one listening? Drop your bloody bombs, robot, all of them.
Now.
Let them fall slowly at the end. I don’t care if they drift down. Just make sure they detonate at the core.”

Marvin exited with poor grace. His tentacles were humping up
, which indicated he was annoyed. I knew that behavior by now. It was like watching a cat with a flipping tail.

I
didn’t care. Let him be pissed-off. This was my war, and I was going to finish it my way.

“Sir?” Newcome said as the first blue-glowing streaks fell from our hold and vanished into the hazy brown atmosphere below us.

“What?”

“Shouldn’t we—shouldn’t we declare war or something? We didn’t even give them an ultimatum.”

I looked at him for a few seconds. I could tell he was as troubled by all this as I was. In fact, he was probably more troubled, and I liked him better for it.

“You’re my conscience, Newcome,” I said.

“Does that mean you’ll announce—?”

“No. We can’t. I’ve already gambled to save civilian casualties. I won’t give them more than that.”

“But sir—”

“They’ll figure it out soon enough,” I snapped, turning back to the frosty little windows that let me gaze down upon the dreadful energies I’d released.

I forced myself to think of my dead children. Indirectly, the beings below me now had struck first, killing my kids and billions of others. Entire worlds had been extinguished by proxy through their construction of the Macros.

But this action wasn’t one of simple vengeance. I had to make sure the Blues were stopped forever.

I turned back to Newcome, and my face was angry now.

“Let me ask you something,” I said. “Did they give us a warning before they released the Macros? Did they ask our permission before launching
Phobos
? No, they didn’t. Instead they insulted us, manipulated us, and lied to us. They never gave us a break, Admiral. With luck, most of their population will survive, but not their industry and technology. When they recover, maybe they’ll have a more cautious attitude toward all the other biotics in the universe.”

The bombs kept falling. So
many of them…

Potemkin
cruised with her sister ships over the atmosphere. All the battleships were unloading their payloads of gravity bombs, slowly carpeting the core from every possible angle. The blue-white streaks fell from my ship and a dozen others like glimmering raindrops.

It took hours for the bombs to touch bottom and start going off. When they did, I felt each of them in my heart. I’d never done anything quite as grim as this, not in my entire career.

Our com-links began to ring the moment the first bombs touched the core and imploded. It was the Blues, trying to open a channel.

I told Marvin to keep it closed. What was there to say? I’d come to the conclusion that their industrial and technological infrastructure was a threat to all humanity. They’d tried to wipe us out repeatedly.
I could not allow them to do it again.

I didn’t think all of them were bad. In fact, I’d had moments when I
’d felt real empathy with them. But they were too dangerous, too unpredictable, too technologically advanced.

I ignored their repeated attempts to communicate until the calls suddenly stopped. Newcome looked up, his eyes red-rimmed and uncertain.

“We probably hit their communications system and knocked it out,” he said. “They can’t even surrender now.”

I nodded and went back to brooding. The bombs continued to fall. They seemed endless, like the drumbeat of a slow summer
shower.

I steeled myself, straightening up and returning to my commander’s chair.

“The Blues can’t be allowed to rise again,” I said aloud.

The command staff glanced at me. No one said a word.

“They can’t be allowed to build another
Phobos
or another race of improved robots. They have to be stopped and this is the only way I know of to accomplish the task.”

Newcome nodded and looked away. No one met my eye. They were afraid of me and afraid of what we were doing.

They’re gravity weapons
, I kept telling myself. No radiation. No fallout. No long-term effects. It would be clean and quick. Whatever the Blues had at the core would be destroyed, but that was all. At least, that’s what I hoped was happening down there.

I recalled something I’d read before coming out here on this final mission at the end of a long, long war. Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the
Enola Gay
, had been a Colonel when he’d dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. He’d reported afterward that he slept well. He said he never worried about it and that if he’d let his actions weigh on his mind, he wouldn’t be worth a damn to anyone.

I hoped my conscience would let me rest so easily.

-45-

Upon returning to Earth, I received less than a hero’s welcome. The headlines on every news site blared, painting me as a butcher of innocents. I was depicted in cartoons kicking around fluffy clouds while wearing a steel suit and a vicious grin. Such were the joys of a free press.

Deciding it was time to go before the people, I summoned Parliament. I ordered them all to return to their huge, spherical chamber. They had been on vacation—it seemed to me they were almost always on vacation—and
they didn’t really want to come back to town.

But when I called, they all came. Even those who were ill made an appearance. They were too afraid not to come. If
there had been one obvious side effect of my recent actions, it was evident in the quick obedience of the rank and file members of my government.

I put on my monkey-suit. It only seemed fitting. Jasmine, swollen with child now, stood in the wings as she had before. She fussed with my saber and seemed more worried about my hair than what I was thinking. But when it was almost time for me to mount the stage, her curiosity got the better of her.

“What are you going to say, Kyle?” she asked, her hands lingering on my stylish, looping lapels.

Her eyes searched mine. I smiled back.

“What has to be said,” I told her.

Her eyes widened.

“Don’t do it,” she said suddenly.

I’d told no one of my plans. She’d figured them out all on her own. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by her intuition—but I was.

“Everything will be fine,” I told her.

“You always say that.”

“And everything turns out good in the end, doesn’t it?”

Jasmine looked unconvinced, but she kissed me and let me go.

I turned and strode out onto the platform. I heard the crowd stand and clap. They clapped dutifully but without enthusiasm. There were no cheers as there had been when the Macros had been defeated. Today, they were uncertain what I was going to do next.

I waved them back to their seats, and the chamber quieted quickly.

“My critics have been relentless,” I said, “second-guessing my every decision. Perhaps they’re right. I don’t agree with them, but I’ll fight to the death—quite literally—for their right to complain about me.”

A few chuckles rose up, but not many. They didn’t know quite what to make of me, these political hacks and posers. I scared them and made them sneer, all at once. I was part court jester and part great white shark in their minds. An impossible mixture of fool
ishness and low animal cunning.

“There was an early Roman general I’ve studied over my lifetime,” I said. “A man named Cincinnatus. He was a land-owner, a man who loved his farm. His son was slain over political disputes, but, despite that, when invaders came to Rome he left that farm and became a general and Rome’s dictator. He saved his nation from destruction. When the war was over, however, he gave it all up and returned to his beloved farm.”

They were all staring at me now. I honestly don’t think any of them knew where I was going with this. My thinking was incomprehensible to them. I might as well be some kind of alien bug up there prattling away at the lectern. I knew this, but I pressed ahead. It was the only way I would ever know peace again.

“General George Washington faced a similar moment. He had near absolute power at the end of the American Revolution. Some of the founding fathers pressed him to become the first American king. He rejected that idea, becoming instead the first president. After his term was up, he left office and handed over power to his successor without a qualm. Like Cincinnatus, he returned to his farm and lived out his days in retirement.”

I thought they were beginning to get it. I could see, looking out over the bright lights, that mouths were hanging open. Newsies and politicians alike were stunned. Could it be true? Could old blood-and-guts Riggs really be stepping down?

“I’m performing one last action as your Emperor,” I said, “the drafting and signing of a new document, a constitution that transforms our planet into a republic. I know some of you want a return to tiny independent nations. I don’t think that’s wise, but local governance will be included under the new rules.”

They were buzzing now, unable to contain themselves. In response, I spoke louder and more forcefully.

“In the future,
there will be a Prime Minister but never again an emperor or a dictator—at least, that’s how I hope it will go. I myself won’t be here. I’m abdicating and retiring from Star Force. I’ll return to my farm in California and rebuild it. The last time I was there, the place was a wreck.”

There were a few nervous twitters at that. Most of the crowd was talking to their neighbors. A few clapped sporadically. They didn’t know what to do and were too scared to cheer or make any overt move. What if this was all some kind of elaborate ruse to out the traitors?

Crow had done such things, suggesting that maybe he should leave his office. Those who had encouraged him the most had been arrested. It made me sad to think that my people now lived in fear of their government. I’d done my best to write a simple document full of diced-up powers and responsibilities. Mostly it listed what the government could
not
do. Time would tell if humanity would adhere to it. At least, I’d given them a chance.

When I wrapped up the speech, I thanked them and praised them all unstintingly. I told them our world had won the war against the machines, and it was all due to their superhuman efforts. In short, I gave them the pep-speech of their lives.

That part they ate up. Politicians love nothing more than getting credit for positive events. By the time I left the stage, I received a standing ovation. Perhaps it was the first real one I’d ever gotten. It sounded different, somehow, with cheering and whistling sprinkled in. There was actual enthusiasm in their voices.

Not everyone was happy
, of course. Some people had invested a lot in my status. Jasmine was among those people. When I went backstage, I found that she’d vanished without leaving a message. I called her, but she didn’t answer.

I was hurt, but I couldn’t afford to give in to my emotions now.
I needed to get the transfer of power worked out. Parliament had to decide who their newly-elected head of state would be and exactly what powers that person would have.

Aft
er several weeks of wrangling, we had a document based upon my original that I felt was pretty solid. Individual freedoms were stipulated. Voting practices, division of powers and the like were hammered out.

Would they stick to it? Time would tell.

During all those long days, I never heard from Jasmine. That hurt me more than anything else, but I never let it show.

* * *

My farm was a wreck. It had been looted and partially burned. I had credits enough to fix it up and transform it into a palace, but I resisted that urge.

Sometimes, working with your hands is the best therapy. A single nanotized man can do the work of a dozen normal people. The only machine I had to help me was my father’s old tractor. I decided to use it rather than plowing the fields by hand. I didn’t want my few visitors and neighbors gawking any more than they already did.

Spring turned into summer, and in the Central Valley, that means it gets
hot
. The sun bronzed my skin and, despite my modifications, I was left sweating and breathing hard when it was a hundred degrees and as still as a desert outside.

I grew crops and rebuilt my house. The new version was better than before, and as most of the neighboring farms had been abandoned, I legally bought extra land from the banks and soon had a nice agricultural business going. I gave in, buying more big machines even though they reminded me of Macros without brainboxes.

On the first of July I was driving my tractor in the cornfields. I’d used a combine to gather the springtime crop a few days earlier, and was replanting and fertilizing again. One of California’s secrets was the long growing season. With hard work and a bit of luck, you could get two or three crops from a field before winter set in.

Something caught my eye as I tooled along, bumping over the furrows and breathing dust. It was
the glint of something shiny.

I stopped the tractor and craned my neck. Was that an extra car in the driveway? Something
colorful next to my drab pickup?

I suspected right away it was a news reporter. The car looked too fancy to be local. It probably flew—all the new models did. Grumbling, I put my machine back into gear and kept plowing. The fellow would just have to wait unt
il I was done. If I steered off-course now, I’d mess up the furrows.

About an hour later
I returned to the barn and parked. Surprisingly, the car was still in the drive. It was a shiny new model with airfoils on the back and skids under the chassis. A rich man’s air-car, just as I’d suspected.

I walked up to the window, already in a sour mood. I didn’t like to be pestered. For the first month or two I’d lived out here, they’d come almost every day. All the online magazines and vid shows wanted an exclusive interview. They rarely got it, not even when they’d sent a beautiful girl with a flashy smile—well, sometimes they’d gotten it then.

The driver got out when she saw me. She was on the other side of the car, standing with her door open and leaning on the roof with one elbow. Her face trembled a bit, and I sensed she was trying to smile. Her smile failed, and she looked ashamed instead.

It was Jasmine.

Her dark hair had lengthened, and the hot breezes lifted her locks until they wrapped around her face and streamed over her shoulder. She pushed strands out of her eyes and finally spoke.

“Hello, Kyle.”

“Hello. Welcome to my humble farm.”

She looked around. “You love it out here, don’t you?”

I leaned on the other side of her car, and we stared across the roof at one another.

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s home to me.”

There was a pause in the conversation. I didn’t speak up because I felt no urge to make things easier on her. She’d ignored me for months. It was up to her to tell me whatever it was she wanted to say.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have left you like that.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stood there, looking tough but not angry. I was past being angry about it.

Jasmine opened the back door of her car and pulled something out into the dying afternoon sun.
I couldn’t see what she was holding at first, but when she turned to me, she was holding up
my baby
.

My tough-guy look vanished. I’d lost count of the months, I guess. She’d come to term and delivered. She hadn’t even called to tell me about it, and I’d been avoiding the news
nets.

“I delivered him last night,” she said. “When I saw his face, he looked so much like you—I felt awful.”

I stared at the kid. His eyes were closed, and to me he looked pretty much like all babies had looked throughout time.

“Yeah,” I said. “Wow, he does look just like me. What a perfect, beautiful baby
!”

She beamed. “I had to come find you,” she said.

What could I do after that? I invited her in, and I served up drinks.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“What have you got?”

“Uh—beer, orange juice and iced tea. That’s about it.”

She laughed and asked for the tea.

I took the opportunity to check her out while she was downing the glass I’d given her. For a normal woman, delivering a first baby would have been a big deal physically. But Jasmine’s body was full of self-repair systems. Her body had returned more or less to normal within hours. Her eyes looked a little tired, but that might have been from the long flight out here.

We talked, and I poked uncertainly at the new kid. He seemed to sleep most of the time.

“What’s his name?” I asked her.

“I haven’t named him yet. I wanted you to help me with that.”

I gave her a blank look. She proceeded to spam me with names, most of which sounded pretentious to me. We finally went with Cody. I’d always liked that name.

The hours went by quietly as they tend to do on a farm. I wasn’t the kind who ran the screens all day, watching net casts. I’d been relishing the peaceful sigh of the winds for months.

When it got dark, I honestly thought she was going to get back into her car and go home. But she didn’t. We talked instead about why she’d left and what she’d been doing with her family back in India. She’d resigned her commission from Star Force, too, in order to take care of the new kid.

“Uh,” I said at about midnight. “I’m turning in. You want to stay the night? I’ve got several empty bedrooms.”

She looked shy. “All right.”

I had to kick a cat off the bed in what had once been Jake’s room. I threw on some fresh sheets and then I came to a sudden realization: where was the baby going to sleep?

I climbed up into the attic and began rummaging around. I recalled that we’d once had—