The Dead Sun

by B. V. Larson

  The missiles had to be timed, naturally. We wanted them to hit in rapid succession, but we didn’t want them to destroy one another. It was a tricky business. Since the dome was so large, we hit it at three widely separated points. Each ship had a target point on the dome equidistant from the other two target points. Once we were synched-up, the computers launched the missiles in sixteen salvoes as the cruisers unloaded their magazines. The missiles had to be timed so each additional strike wasn’t destroyed by a previous warhead. They were programmed to come in about fifteen seconds apart.

  “With luck, we’ll kill the target in the first few hits. Set-up a retrieval program. If the missiles aren’t destroyed, we’ll fly them back up into orbit and pick them up.”

  Nomura worked her console. Finally, she shook her head.

  “Impossible, sir,” she said. “The gravity is too great. They’ll be dropping at too high a velocity. We won’t be able to get them turned upward again.”

  “Damn. Well, as long as we take the Macros out, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

  We watched and waited for about three minutes before the strikes began. The staffers cheered as missile after missile slammed into the dome. A terrific cloud of dust and debris swirled up in the region. Glowing orange, the terrain was scorched for a mile out from each strike.

  “How’s it going?” I asked. “Do we have a kill yet?”

  Six waves of missiles had reached their target, and the rest were underway. I was anxious to have this finished and behind me. Already, I was fighting the next battle, the one that counted: the battle for Earth.

  “The sensors aren’t reporting penetration yet, sir,” Nomura said.

  Glowering, I tapped the screen and spread open the raw data streams. I studied the numbers.

  “The dome’s still there.”

  “Seventh strike incoming.”

  “Give me a visual, a computer interpolation through that cloud of dust.”

  Nomura hesitated. “It won’t be accurate.”

  “That’s why it’s called an interpolation. Give it to me.”

  She tapped, and I sweated. The eighth strike had landed before she was done. Half our missiles had already hit the target.

  So far, everything had failed according to the image I was seeing now. The dome was orange, rather than a glassy-white, which meant it had been stressed. But it hadn’t buckled; it hadn’t gone out. Not even for the few seconds necessary to get a single warhead inside to kill the factories that must be hiding under there.

  “Damn,” I said as the ninth wave flew into the mess and fresh white flashes puffed out from all three sides of the dome. “We’re not in full synch anymore. The strikes on the northern side appear to be nearly a second late.”

  “Adjusting, Colonel,” Nomura said calmly.

  “Adjusting? It’s too late for that!”

  I fumed as the tenth and the eleventh wave swung home and blew up. We were down to the twelfth wave before I saw any improvement in timing. The twelfth wave hit all at once and on all three sides. That made the entire dome flicker and dim to an orange so deep it was almost red.

  “That’s better. We’ve got four more shots.”

  We all watched intently. There were no more cheers, however. Everyone was almost silent. The program was set, and there was no more time to fiddle with any settings. We’d done our best.

  The last four waves slammed into the dome…but they failed to bring it down.

  A collective exhalation swept the bridge. No one cheered. No one cried. We were grim-faced and stunned.

  “I don’t believe it,” I said. “I’ve never seen a Macro dome take that kind of punishment before. It should have gone down.”

  “Perhaps they’ve improved their technology,” Nomura suggested.

  I looked at her. “Maybe. But I’m more likely to believe the dome is tougher than previous ones we’ve encountered. It covers about twenty-five times as much area as a one-mile diameter dome. Maybe the answer is simple and implied by the mathematics.”

  Nomura nodded slowly. She tapped at her console.

  “This dome does appear to be thicker,” she said. “It may require a strike twenty-five times as great to take it down as one of the smaller domes did in the past because it covers that much more area.”

  I rubbed at my neck. I had a sudden pain there. The dome was already recovering. We watched as it went from reddish-brown to orange, then to amber, and finally to white again. It was back to its full strength. We’d done nothing but blast open craters around it.

  “We didn’t know, but we should have,” I said.

  “We didn’t have enough warheads,” Nomura said. “What was there to know?”

  “We could have built a massive bomb if we’d waited a day.”

  She was quiet for a moment then said: “Do you want the primary guns to bombard the target?”

  I laughed. “What for? If nukes won’t take it down, they aren’t even going to feel our cannons. Just hold in orbit. Let me think.”

  I knew from long experience with Macro domes they were always very tough. There were only two ways to take them out. Either you had to blow them up with extreme firepower, or you had to walk through the fields and take them down from the inside.

  “The domes are built to prevent fast moving objects and high-energy penetrations,” I said.

  “I recall that from my academy courses,” Nomura replied. She said this in such a deadpan way, I wasn’t sure if she was joking or not.

  “A slow-moving object can penetrate any dome,” I continued. “If said object is going at about a walking pace. That’s how the worker Macros go through with fresh minerals and fuel.”

  Nomura looked up at me curiously. I could tell she was beginning to understand where I was going with this.

  “Should we order Fleet to send more vessels to our position, Colonel?” she asked. “With enough warheads, we can destroy this target. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “How long before they can reach us?”

  Captain Nomura worked her calculators. She shouted for support, and the navigational team fed her numbers. Within two minutes, she had my answer.

  “The first ship can reach us in two days. They are all out at the end of their paths through the system far from the core. Twenty more will reach us within three days if we wait. That should be enough.”

  I nodded slowly. “Order them to come to us. Tell Jasmine the order comes from me. They’re to break off their searching and mass up here. This dome must go down.”

  “Very good, sir,” she said.

  When she’d finished, I was still staring at that glassy, milky surface.

  “Now that you’ve relayed my orders, Captain,” I said, “I want you to take us down.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Two or three days is too long. We could do it today and return the entire fleet to Earth that much faster. This has already dragged on longer than I’d anticipated. Worse, now that we’ve shown the enemy we know they’re here, they will begin attempting to escape or build up forces to counter us. I don’t want to be chasing them down tunnels into the crust of this huge rock. I don’t want to face an army of fresh enemy machines either. We have to try to take them out right now.”

  Nomura stared at me. “How, sir?”

  “We’re going to have to walk in with a bomb. How else?”

  Before the next hour was up, I wished I’d brought Kwon or Gaines with. I had a few marines on each ship, but they weren’t veterans of a dozen battles. Not since the desperate campaigns for Earth and Eden had troops marched into a dome and blown it up. I’d invented the process, but no one else aboard was familiar with it.

  The Fleet people were downright terrified. I figured they thought I was crazy, including Nomura herself. She wouldn’t be the first to think that—probably not the last, either.

  Our three cruisers nosed down and dipped into the atmosphere reluctantly. I’d let her take an hour to circle the rock one last time, reducing speed and
making adjustments. I put up with this grudgingly. It wasn’t every day we landed a ship on a burnt out star with more gravity than Jupiter itself.

  The engines were straining, and I could already feel the tremendous pull. We’d ordered everyone into a crash seat, complete with nanite arms to hold us down.

  The atmosphere was thin—thinner than that of Mars, but we still felt it bump and shiver against the ship on the way down. The hull temperature increased with each mile we dropped, too. I had the ships reconfigure themselves into smaller, tighter designs. The nanite walls bubbled and rippled. The walls closed in overhead giving everyone a claustrophobic sensation. By the time we landed, we wouldn’t be able to stand up because the ceilings would be so low—in fact, I wasn’t sure if we could stand up at all under the terrific gravitational force we’d have to endure.

  The crew was scared. I could see it in their eyes. I decided it was time to say something. I opened a channel to all three ships and to every crewman’s helmet.

  “Crews and marines,” I said. “This is Colonel Kyle Riggs. I’m here to tell you that you are all officially part of Riggs’ Pigs now, which is whatever outfit I happen to be attached to in action. As many in my units have learned in the past, being one of the Pigs isn’t always fun. But we have a mission, and it can be done. I’ve been in the atmosphere of gas giants more than once. Gas giants are worse than this landing, let me tell you. Sure, we’ll have even higher levels of gravity to deal with—along with plenty of radiation—but we won’t have that thick, horrid atmosphere: Thousands of miles of nauseous gasses—I hate gas giants. They put such great pressure on the hull that…well, never mind about that now.”

  I realized I was supposed to be encouraging them, not freaking them out further with my old war stories. I changed the direction of my speech appropriately.

  “Here’s some advice from a veteran: Don’t stand up too fast. Keep your head low, and keep it even with your heart if you’re feeling dizzy. Try not to fall down, either. It hurts a lot under heavy Gs. Most of you only have flight suits, and you might have difficulty getting around. I suggest you arrange your surroundings so you can do your work without having to move much.”

  All over the ship, the crew put this advice to good use. They all had permission to command the ship to reshape around them. They could mold the consoles causing them to sprout from the ceiling, for example, where they could see them while reclining, instead of requiring them to stand over and look down on a flat surface. They could redesign their environments so it best suited them. We’d long ago gone with an editable design system for our ships, as it allowed crews to adjust to a wide variety of situations. We figured we could never come up with enough presets ahead of time to take every contingency into account.

  The effect on the crews over the next several minutes was quite positive. They felt like they were doing something. Everyone likes to up their odds of survival and improve their working conditions to their liking. Occupying a terrified mind was the best way to keep it from panicking, in my experience.

  I switched off the general channel then and spoke to my small number of marines as a group. There were only eight stationed on each ship, twenty-four altogether. It seemed an entirely inadequate number to me.

  “Marines!” I shouted.

  They “oorahed” me, and I smiled.

  “This is our chance to shine! We’re going to kick these metal insects off this dead sun the old-fashioned way, with a marine boot in their collective behinds!”

  They cheered again, and I waited until they’d settled down.

  “I’m sure your team leaders have you suited-up in full armor. Make sure you’re fully juiced and carrying your best generators. I’m expecting to have to run the exoskeletons nonstop once we land.”

  I was assured by every noncom that they were geared and ready to go. I knew that already, but I wanted them to hear my voice instead of the creak and groan of the metal shells around them.

  I opened my mouth to say something further about the marine spirit when a blinking light went off overhead. Like everyone, I was lying down now, beginning to really feel the Gs.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked Nomura, who was next to me and tapping with her hands on controls at her sides. Directly overhead was a screen displaying status reports. I hadn’t bothered to reconfigure my operating station, being more concerned with my own battle suit and my speeches.

  “Hull breach,” she said calmly.

  “Can we shrink the ship down flatter? Did we lose anyone?”

  She turned her head with a visible effort and looked at me.

  “The hull breach was on our sister ship, the Trieste,” she said. “The ship was lost, Colonel.”

  I froze for a second, then nodded.

  “Carry on,” I said. “Make sure it doesn’t happen to the rest.”

  I turned back to the screens. I could see what she was talking about displayed there now. The Trieste was displayed as a red wireframe, meaning it was dead. There was nothing left and no survivors.

  I never finished my speech with the marines. Since a third of them had died in the middle of it, I just didn’t have the heart to keep blowing sunshine around inside their helmets.

  -28-

  The cruiser Trieste had collapsed like a sub that sinks too deep into the ocean. It had been designed for stress and pressures on the hull, but numbers on a blueprint and real-world conditions are two different things as any engineer will tell you. After that, we crushed our ceilings down further, and it felt like I was in a movie theater with seats and walls that kept shrinking. The ceiling screen was now inches from my faceplate. When I turned my head, Nomura was flat on her back looking uncomfortable. The ceiling was almost touching her chest, and I realized the ship had made special allowances for me alone. I had a battle suit on and required much more space than the other humans. They were all but entombed around me.

  To their credit, no one was verbally complaining. There were a few panting moments and a few sobs, but not one of them blubbered constantly or showed other signs of outright panic.

  “Ten miles to go,” Nomura said. “We’re slowing down now. Thrusters are at full power, and we’ve only lost one engine on the starboard side.”

  “Excellent. It’s almost over.”

  Less than a minute later, I thought the ship had lost power. There was a shudder and a jarring sensation then the singing sound of the engines died down.

  “We’ve landed, Colonel,” Nomura said. “You can begin your mission—and please sir, do try to hurry.”

  Grunting, I reached up with my right gauntlet to touch the ceiling—but nothing happened.

  I tried again, putting more force into it. I heard my arm whine and it shook fractionally. Then I had my arm up. Could it really be that heavy? It felt as if I was lifting a five-hundred pound weight.

  I realized with something of a shock that I was probably moving much more weight than that. Only the exoskeleton suit inside my battle suit allowed me to move at all.

  I ordered the ship to respond to my touch, and to build me an airlock. I realized now that I should have moved down to the sally port with the rest of the marines before we’d landed. The ship had a built-in way to exit the troop pods. I wasn’t able to get there via corridors any longer. I’d have to get out and crawl over the hull itself.

  Movement for the crew around me involved painful crawling. I saw them doing it, and they looked like kids with their big brothers sitting on their spines taking a cruel ride.

  Molding a new airlock out of sluggish nanites, the ship eventually managed to ease me out of its hull without decompressing the entire thing. I climbed out and stood on top of the ship, swaying.

  I’ve been on the Moon before—hell, I’ve been on several moons. But this place was more desolate than any landscape I’d ever set eyes upon. For one thing it was dark, almost pitch-black. If it hadn’t been for local starlight, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything without my suit’s infrared settings.

&nbs
p; But it wasn’t just rocky, dusty and bleak. It was scorched-looking. I suspected this wasn’t entirely due to our recent barrage of nukes, although that hadn’t improved things much. This place had been subjected to temperatures unlike anything I’d ever met up with in person. It was a burnt-out husk.

  After looking around for a few seconds, I felt dizzy. I leaned forward, dipping my head until it was even with my heart. I felt it race in my chest. I wasn’t used to this yet, I told myself. I’d have to take it easy at first until I adjusted.

  When I could walk again, I labored my way over the ship, clanging and thumping. To the crewmen trapped inside, it must have sounded like I was beating the hull with sledgehammers.

  I found the sally port in the aft section. The ship looked so strange to me once I was down on my feet in front of it. The whole thing had been flattened dramatically. A cruiser of this class was usually about as tall as it was wide but longer and drawn in a cylindrical shape. Andoria wasn’t anything like that today. It had flattened itself down to a third its normal height and widened out fractionally. It was about the same length as before.

  I slammed my fist on the sally port. I’d expected to meet the marines here, gathering their kits and standing in their armor outside. Instead, I was met with a closed hatch.

  Finally, a squealing sound came through my gauntlets. I knew they were trying to get out. I helped, and the hatch swung open. Exterior ports weren’t usually fields of nanites. They were solid surfaces. The hatch hung open, and I looked inside.

  I was in for a shock.

  “What are you doing, marines? This isn’t nap time!”

  They were in there lying on the benches. Only one of them was in a sitting position. He was near the hatch, and I suspected he’d been the one to open it. He had a noncom’s green lights on his suit.

  “I’m sorry sir,” he said, sounding like he was out of breath. “We can’t move much. I think Taylor passed out.”