The Dead Sun

by B. V. Larson

  “Marvin? What are you doing in this dead system? You’re supposed to be back on Earth, building weapons. I thought we had an understanding, Marvin, damn you.”

  “We did have an ‘understanding’, Colonel. In fact, I believe that was the exact term used. I’m surprised, however, that you apparently did not fully comprehend the nature of our ‘understanding’.”

  -31-

  He had a companion with him, probably the last guy I’d expected to see helping with the rescue effort.

  “Professor Hoon?” I asked. “Is that you in that getup?”

  “This is a standard-issue high-pressure suit.”

  I’d managed to get up into a sitting position in my hole, and Marvin and Hoon were staring down over the edge at me. Grit and sparking rocks tinkled down striking me with surprising force. It was as if they were throwing baseballs at me.

  “Get me out of this hole, please. We have to take off right now.”

  “There’s a problem, Colonel,” Marvin said, wrapping his tentacles around me. “You’re too heavy.

  I made a sound of exasperation. “Look, we haven’t got long until the machines get here.”

  Marvin scanned with his cameras. Several of them appeared to spot something.

  “Not long at all,” he said. “I can see them now. They aren’t moving quickly, but they do appear to be determined.”

  “Right, now scoop me up, and give me some juice, will you?”

  Marvin plugged a tentacle into my side and my suit crackled. Lights flickered and systems awoke. I felt air blowing again, and that was possibly the biggest relief. The internal temperature had dropped below freezing inside my suit. Fortunately, my body could survive such hardships—but they weren’t fun.

  With my exoskeleton working again, and Marvin’s help, I managed to get onto the surface. I was surprised to find Hoon’s claws trying to help, lifting my limbs.

  “Where’s the ship?” I demanded.

  “That is another difficulty,” Marvin said. “There is no ship—well, that’s not exactly true. I’m the ship.”

  I finally caught on. Marvin was in his flight configuration. He’d been given permission to transfer into a space-mobile shape so he could return home. Of course, it was evident that he hadn’t gone back to Earth at all.

  “What do I have to do?” I asked.

  “Crawl into this compartment with Professor Hoon.”

  I did it. I didn’t have much choice as the machines really were coming. I’d bombarded the area with radio signals to help Marvin find me. Even without that, Marvin’s main engine had given off energy signatures while landing that were enough of a beacon to call them all to the area like a dinner bell.

  The compartment was cramped, I had to strip off my exoskeleton and wore only a nanite suit of nanocloth. The cold bit through instantly. It had to be about two hundred below out here, and the lightweight inner suit didn’t have much more heating power than an electric blanket.

  Hoon and I were soon crammed into a compartment. Shivering and curled up into a ball, I investigated several shiny rocks that I found stored inside with us. I tried to toss them out, but Marvin shoved them back in and sealed the opening.

  Immediately, a horrible crushing pressure came down on my spine. I groaned and was unable to speak.

  “It’s amazing to me that your life form defeated mine in the end,” Hoon observed. “My species can withstand much greater pressures along with a thousand other hardships that would kill the toughest of your breed.”

  I wanted to tell him his people would taste better with garlic and butter than ours would, but I couldn’t talk under the heavy acceleration. I guess that was for the best.

  When the Gs eased and I could talk, I was as full of questions as Marvin and Hoon were. I insisted that they start answering first.

  “What I want to know is why I’m being rescued by you two rather than a Star Force cruiser?”

  “I should think that was obvious,” Hoon said.

  “Colonel,” Marvin said, “we were closer and answered the distress call when it came in. The cruisers won’t be here for at least another day. You are quite fortunate in this detail. I don’t think you would have survived long enough for the fleet to rescue you.”

  I knew he was right, but I was still annoyed and confused. What were Hoon and Marvin doing here near the dead sun?

  “All right,” I said, “I’m grateful to both of you. I was in enemy territory and with all the radiation, cold, and lack of supplies… Yes, I needed your help.”

  “Again, the robot is correct!” Hoon said. “What an astounding machine you have, Riggs.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “He’s intelligent…ingenious, in fact. He’s friendly as well—up to a point.”

  “I mean, what did you mean about the robot being correct?” I asked.

  “Before we landed, he said you’d express gratitude. I argued it hardly matched your barbaric behavior patterns. I believe it’s due to the fact that the robot has been observing your primitive species longer than we have. He understands your psychology and is better able to predict your crude responses to stimuli. I would go so far as to say that if Marvin had been on our side in the Great Conflict, we would have won.”

  I privately agreed with him, but I didn’t want to admit it.

  “With all due respect, Ambassador,” I said, “we had plenty of great minds on our side besides Marvin.”

  “You’ve copied his brainbox, then? How many of these robots do you have?”

  I shook my head. “No, that’s not what I meant. Marvin is one of a kind. He likes it that way.”

  “Seems like a wasted opportunity.”

  “Really? Are you so anxious to create a third race of machines to compete with?”

  Hoon seemed to mull that over. “No. You make an excellent point.”

  I was surprised to hear Hoon say that. He normally rejected any statement, true or not, that conflicted with his original thesis. In my opinion, he was a terrible scientist for this reason alone.

  “All right,” I said, starting over on my quest to figure out how this rescue had been engineered. “I get that you heard the call and came to help. That’s fine. But why were you in this system? Marvin, you were to report back to Earth and start building defenses. On the way, you were supposed to be dropping off Hoon at Eden-6. What happened to the plan?”

  “Many plans are altered during actual execution,” Marvin said with typical evasiveness.

  “We had a deal, Marvin. You were supposed to go home.”

  “That was not my understanding.”

  “What?” I demanded, becoming angry. “Don’t try to twist my words and intentions to your liking. You knew what I wanted and blatantly ignored it.”

  “I understood you perfectly, Colonel. That’s true.”

  “But you disobeyed my orders anyway.”

  “Not at all. No orders were specified. We had an understanding. That is not a legally binding command.”

  I grumbled, but not too much. After all, he’d come down to this desolate place and saved my butt when quite possibly no one else could have managed it. I decided to drop the matter and be more careful with our mutual “understandings” in the future.

  “Whatever,” I said. “Let’s move on. Marvin, why is Hoon here? How did you convince him to stay in this dead system rather than return home?”

  “The Ambassador hadn’t yet completed his political goals. I suggested that acquiring information was key to his efforts, and he agreed.”

  I mulled that one over for a moment, frowning. I looked at Hoon.

  “So, you’re a spy?”

  “That is a harsh term. I’m a diplomat. I’m gathering and transferring information to achieve political goals.”

  I laughed. “All right, but that sounds like the definition of a spy to me. If I understand you correctly Hoon, you were curious as to what we were really up to out here. I’ll thank you both again for helping me—but you’re still
not getting a planet out of it, Hoon.”

  “Do you have a planet to give?” Hoon asked me.

  I opened my mouth then closed it again. He had me there. If I had the power as an individual to award a world to one species or another, what did that make me? No less of a dictator than Crow, certainly.

  The worst part was that he was right. Hoon had put his claw directly upon a sore spot. I was extremely powerful—too powerful in my mind.

  “I’ll bring up the issue with Earth’s parliament,” I said. “You’ll have your day to make your case. I don’t know how they’ll decide.”

  Hoon bobbled his eyes. I figured out that was his way of nodding. “Just as I thought. You are a political creature in the end. I came to save you in hopes you would be grateful for your life. Gratitude doesn’t appear to move a hard heart so easily.”

  I grumbled, unsure as to how to respond, but after a few moments of thought I had an angle.

  “Look, Hoon, you don’t want me to have that kind of power,” I said. “What if I decide to exterminate all rival races and take all these planets for Earth tomorrow? Who could stop me?”

  Hoon didn’t answer.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. And I’m not just talking about me, you have to understand. I’m talking about whoever is in my place in the future, whoever commands Star Force. In an interstellar federation of planets, if that’s what we have going, the guy who runs the fleets runs everything. There’s only one military, and no civilian control over that military, so no one can stop me. That’s not healthy in my opinion.”

  “If you defeat the machines, then it is indeed healthy for all of us,” Hoon replied.

  He had me there. For the time being, I couldn’t do anything about our political structure. I had to save everyone’s collective hide first. I promised myself things would change afterward.

  The next day, I reached Jasmine’s ship. I transferred myself aboard and made my way to the bridge after a shower and a meal. Being inside Marvin’s belly for long hours hadn’t been pleasant for anyone—especially with Hoon as my close-quarters companion.

  We went over the search data I’d missed. No further outposts of Macro ships or domes had been found. There were still a few machines crawling around on the surface of the dead sun like cockroaches, but they had no factories to build replacements or ships to escape.

  “They’re trapped there,” I said.

  “We should wipe them out,” Jasmine suggested.

  “I promised I wouldn’t.”

  Newcome and Jasmine both stared at me in disbelief as I explained the conversation I’d had with Macro Command. While they found the information about a broken ring on the surface fascinating, they didn’t seem to appreciate my dealing with the enemy.

  “You can’t just promise to leave them alive!” Jasmine complained.

  “In this instance, Colonel,” Newcome said, “I have to agree with Captain Sarin. We should take the time to burn every last one of them to slag.”

  I nodded, understanding their position. Hell, maybe they were right.

  “Look,” I said. “The Macros keep their deals when we keep ours. They try to cheat, they bend the rules, but due to some twist in their programming, they do stick to the letter of their deals. I don’t think we should endanger that for the future.”

  “I believe I have the perfect solution,” Newcome said. “Let’s destroy everything here, then when we fight it out with their fleets over Earth we can leave the last ship untouched. But now is not the time for half-measures.”

  “There is a certain kind of logic to that,” I admitted. “But I want to pull out of here now. As far as we can tell, the enemy has no more domes, no more factories. They are therefore not a threat. Their only viable force is the armada approaching Earth now.”

  “What if they’re hiding more domes somewhere?” protested Jasmine.

  “They might be. But we’re out of time. The odds we’ll find them now are low. We’ve already scanned every rock in the system. I’m not going to spend another week out here just to make sure. Get the fleet underway, we’re pulling out tonight.”

  They wanted to argue but stopped themselves. They knew that when I’d made a firm decision, there was no changing my mind.

  * * *

  The next ten days were agonizingly slow. I read reports from Earth, but they didn’t give me the full picture. They were building bases and guns, ships and satellites. Everyone on the planet had thrown themselves into the war effort.

  When we reached the Solar System, I came to a new decision. I used the ring-phone system to talk to parliament members and told them what I wanted. They hustled to obey.

  As much as I liked to pretend they were in charge, they all knew I was. This fact was disconcerting sometimes. I think it was because they feared me. I’d turned my fleet’s guns on the ruling class to bring down Crow less than a year ago. More politicians than soldiers had died in the conflict. Usually, that wasn’t how history played out. In most cases, the men in the trenches did all the dying while the politicians sat at home and gave speeches and orders.

  I’d brought the war home to the political class. They’d buckled quickly and hadn’t forgotten the lesson. I’m sure they hated me, but for now, they ran like rats when I barked.

  “What’s this?” Jasmine asked me when I slid an open file toward her across the table.

  “A new ship design,” I said. “I’ve been working on it with Marvin. I call it a ‘megahab’. It’s kind of like the satellites we encountered when we first met the Centaurs. Do you remember? They were the ones that held their entire population in space.”

  “Megahabs? I still don’t understand…but those things were huge!”

  “They were huge, yes, but very cheap to build.”

  “They’re like giant balloons of thin nanite membranes…” she said. “You can’t intend to put people aboard. A single missile or laser strike would kill them all.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “But they’ll work. They’ll fit through the rings, too. We’ve accounted for that. We call them megahabs because each one will hold about a million people.”

  Jasmine shook her head in wonderment. “What are they for?”

  “To evacuate Earth, or at least as many people as I can.”

  “Evacuate…where will they go, Kyle?”

  “They will go to the Eden system, where else? We’ve got a planet or two to spare out there. The system could use a billion new colonists.”

  “What about Eden’s infrastructure? It will be overwhelmed, and people will starve.”

  “Life will be hard at first, but I believe in the hard-working spirit of humanity. We’ll only take on able-bodied volunteers—families that want a slice of land and a fresh start.”

  Jasmine looked dubious. About then, Newcome arrived and looked over the plans.

  “What’s this then?” he asked. “Is it some kind of experimental craft?”

  “You could say that,” I said.

  “He wants to empty Earth with these things, to transfer millions of citizens out of the home system.”

  Newcome laughed. “We’ve got less than a month to go, old chap,” he said. “This sounds a little on the ambitious side.”

  “It is,” I admitted. “But I think it’s necessary. We’ll drop one of these down near every major city. They’ll fill up, first-come first-serve. When we’ve taken everyone we can, we’ll stop. I’m hoping to get about ten percent of the population into space over the next month.”

  “How will you build them all in time?”

  “The engines are already in stock. The nanites are already in stock. All we have to do is give them the program and load them up with a small crew and some supplies. They’ll fly.”

  Newcome shook his head. “Engines? Nanites? Those elements are already spoken for. We’ll lose a hundred cruisers worth of production if we do this.”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “But I’d rather save a hundred million people. Jasmine, do you recall what the Macro
s did the last time we fought them in an all-out battle over an inhabited world?”

  She looked reluctant but nodded. “They killed the population the moment they realized they were going to lose.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “We can’t be sure they won’t use that same tactic again this time. Look at it this way: if they win, we’re all dead anyway. But if we win, we could still lose our population. I want to save as many as I can. I’m willing to scrap a hundred cruisers to preserve humanity.”

  They had a hard time arguing with my logic. They relayed the orders, and the parliamentary types relayed the message to the public for me. It wasn’t long before Miklos was on my screen, raving.

  “Colonel Riggs?” he said, his eyes dark and shining. “What’s going on? I’m getting the most insane change-orders through the computers. Surely this has to be some kind of mistake.”

  “It isn’t,” I told him. I proceeded to give him the same speech I’d given the others.

  Miklos was even less receptive than they had been. The Fleet was his first love. I honestly thought he was a bit unhinged on the topic. But over the next hour I got him to understand the seriousness of the situation.

  “Well, sir…” he said at last, “I’m glad you didn’t lose your temper—at least, not completely.”

  I smiled at him tightly. “I’m glad you can see the need for this.”

  “I can see your reasoning—and I hope you will be able to understand mine in the future.”

  I frowned at him, unsure what he was talking about.

  “Colonel,” he said. “Can you excuse me? I have much work to do.”

  “Of course,” I said, still frowning. “Carry on.”

  I was sick of explaining things to people, so I tapped the connection closed. I was still wondering what he meant about his reasoning and my understanding it in the future, but right now, I had a headache.

  About an hour later, Newcome came to me, frowning deeply. His white eyebrows had bunched up in the middle of his face into one long fluffy line.

  “What it is, Admiral?”

  “Disturbing news from Earth, sir,” he said.