The Dead Sun

by B. V. Larson

  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.

  -40-

  When the Macro fleet veered off and stopped chasing us, we wheeled and began chasing them. What else could we do?

  We pored over the maps until our eyes burned. There had to be a way to get them back into the range of our gravity cannons.

  “Can’t we simply take the gravity weapons off the moon bases and equip our ships with them?” Newcome asked. “Even one such cannon—”

  I shook my head. Marvin gave a more detailed answer.

  “We don’t have the energy output, Admiral Newcome,” he said. “Even if we removed the engines and other armament from this battleship, we couldn’t generate enough power to operate a single heavy cannon. Only Phobos was able to accomplish that task.”

  “Besides,” I said, “we don’t have enough time left now to fly to Jupiter immediately, remove a cannon and fix it on our nosecone. By the time we get back into range, the enemy fleet will have reached Earth.”

  “Right, well…right…” Newcome said.

  “Sirs,” said Marvin, slithering forward. “I think Admiral Newcome might be onto something. It would be a challenge, but the possibilities already have my neural chains firing. It’s most stimulating.”

  “What are you talking about, robot?” I asked. “Explain quickly. There isn’t much time. My next move is an all-out attack on their rear ranks to entice them to turn. If they take the bait, we’ll run, forcing them to chase us right back to Jupiter.”

  Newcome’s eyes bugged from his head as he heard me explain the essence of my plans. His Adam’s apple bounced up and down as he swallowed a lump.

  “I’m hoping someone has a better idea…?” Newco
me said, looking around the group.

  “I believe I might have a superior option,” Marvin said. “We can’t afford the time to return to Jupiter to dismantle gravity cannons. Besides, as I said before, they’d be too large. However, we could build one in-flight with materials found at hand.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Materials? What materials? I thought you had to have collapsed star-matter to build one of those things.”

  “That is correct.”

  I stared at his cameras for a few seconds, and they stared back at me.

  “You’re telling me you smuggled collapsed matter onto my ship, aren’t you? If you did that, how did you keep us from running heavy? Why aren’t we dragging our butts even at full engine thrust?”

  “Quite possibly,” Marvin said, “I’ve made compensating adjustments. Recall that my laboratory is still located aboard this vessel. I have a number of pieces of specialized equipment there, including inertial dampeners with independent power supplies.”

  “Why the hell did you bring something like that aboard?”

  “I thought a gravity weapon might be useful at some point in the future. It’s only a small amount of star dust. But with careful focus, we could build a small cannon with the supplies I have.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “A small cannon? What could that do? Those ships aren’t jet fighters. They’re displacing around ten thousand tons each.”

  “Nevertheless, there is a system aboard every ship that is highly vulnerable. If we were to destroy the enemy’s drives, we could disable their ships if not destroy them outright.”

  Internally, I was raging at the thought that Marvin had once again done something sneaky. But I tried to push that crippling thought away for now. How could I use it? If we did have a small gravity cannon aboard…

  “We could disable them, right,” Newcome said, sounding as if he’d thought of something enlightening. “That would cause them to slow. Each ship that drifted behind their main fleet would be easy prey for our fleet. We would catch them one at a time and blast them in unison.”

  “Well stated, Admiral Newcome,” Marvin said.

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said. “We still don’t have a power source. How are we going to provide this mini-cannon enough power to fire?”

  “The term ‘mini-cannon’ is a misnomer, sir,” Marvin complained. “The weapon would be physically larger than anything—”

  “Fine, whatever,” I said. “How do we power it?”

  “That is the biggest problem of all,” Marvin admitted. “But I believe I’ve solved the difficulty during the span of this conversation. We’ll have to cannibalize other ships, removing generators from each. As you may recall, each ship was outfitted with additional power sources in order to drive the new engines.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But those engines are the only reason we’re able to keep up with the Macros.”

  “Correct. Not all our ships would be able to keep up.”

  I mulled it over unhappily. This entire plan sounded risky and possibly unworkable. If I stripped generators from ships that had to be left behind, I would be splitting my fleet. But the only other alternative would be to attack the enemy rear while outnumbered by more than two to one.

  “How many generators do we need, Marvin?” I asked him.

  “Most of those that match the couplings we have aboard this vessel. We don’t have time to rewire the power harness.”

  “Most? Which ones?”

  “If we stripped all the generators from all the battleships except this one, it would be sufficient.”

  I frowned and paced. “That will make the battleships slow. We’ll have to leave them behind.”

  Newcome lit up and cleared his throat.

  “What is it, man?” I asked.

  “I volunteer, sir.”

  “For what? Are you suggesting you’ll suit up and attach extra generators to this ship’s hull?”

  He looked startled.

  “Not at all, Colonel,” he said. “I’ll command the break-off forces.”

  I smiled thinly. “I get it. You want to get off my ship. All right, where would you take this taskforce of slow battleships?”

  “Back to Jupiter, sir, to stand with the greatest fortification Earth has left.”

  “Actually,” I said. “That isn’t a bad idea... Go.”

  “Sir?”

  “Get moving. Strip off all the extra generators and fix them onto this ship. Marvin, you should move out too. Build me the gravity cannon. Go for accuracy rather than power. You’ll be gunning it as you have the most experience. We need something that will pop enemy drives like light bulbs.”

  Both Newcome and Marvin hurried from the bridge. I was left with Jasmine, who stepped to my side. When she spoke, she did so quietly, so the other staffers couldn’t hear her words.

  “Kyle, you just gave them both what they wanted, you know. They look like kids at Christmas.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But why Jupiter? Why not have Newcome follow us with the battleships? He might be able to help, even if he comes late to the battle.”

  I shook my head. “If the Macros do turn to fight because we’re hurting them too much, I want the battleships back at Jupiter.”

  She frowned. “Why?”

  “Because,” I said. “After we’re gone and Earth’s gone, Jupiter might be one of the last holdouts for our species. This could turn very ugly by the end, Jasmine. We’ll need every human life to start over and a core fleet as well.”

  She looked troubled by my words, and I didn’t blame her.

  The following hours were tense, and no one on Potemkin got much sleep. The walls reverberated as clanking grav-boots tromped on the outer hull. There wasn’t enough room to stuff extra generators inside the ship, so we’d decided to bolt them onto the outside. In many places, we simply fused them to the hull with constructive nanite welds. Hooking up the power leads and fuel lines was probably the hardest part.

  Building the gravity cannon itself turned out not to be that difficult. Marvin had smuggled a small brick of stardust onto the ship which must have weighed half as much as the entire vessel. It was his addition that had left us with fluctuating power consumption readings for some time now, rather than engine failure.

  I figured that Marvin might have been hoarding the star dust for other nefarious reasons. Maybe he’d give a pinch of it to someone he didn’t like as he had done with that little golden statue he’d carved in my image. Used as a focal point for an implosion—I didn’t want to think about what he’d been planning. I told myself none of Marvin’s skullduggery mattered at this point. We needed his pirated prize.

  Once we’d loaded two dozen new generators aboard, the ship fairly thrummed with power. Potemkin looked like a ship that had cancerous growths clustering all over it.

  Chasing down the Macros turned out to be the easiest part. They were locked on a safe course which took them far from our planets, but we had no such restrictions. We were able to fly on a more direct route and catch up to them.

  We were a few hours from Mars when I finally heard the golden words I’d been waiting for.

  “Ready, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said.

  He’d just come back aboard the bridge, and he shed his “tool kit” as he did so. Extra tentacles and propulsion systems formed a piled heap on the deck where he’d discarded them.

  “You’re ready?” I asked. “For what?”

  “To commence firing.”

  I stared at him for a second with bloodshot eyes. I had a mug of coffee in one hand, and my other rested on the command table, propping me up.

  “We’re in range of the Macros?”

  “Yes.”

  “And your gun will work?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well then, shoot them down, man!” I roared, standing up and coming to life.

  “Firing solution computed,” he said. “Firing.”

  The ship lurched hard and went into a backward spin. I was thrown to the c
eiling, and my coffee went into my face. It stung and burned. A few droplets even found their way into my nostrils.

  “Control that!” I shouted, falling on my face on the main deck again. “Jasmine, do you have the helm?”

  She wasn’t on the bridge. I’d lost track of her. I chewed on her staffers until they had the ship leveled off again.

  “Sorry about that, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said. “I should have warned you. Gravity weapons have significant recoil properties.”

  “Yeah, they kick like mules. Let’s compensate for that next time. Can you automate a thruster on the top of the ship? It should fire hard the moment you engage your firing sequence.”

  “I’ve located controls for the attitude jets—gaining control—done. The process is now automated. I suggest we test it.”

  I looked at him. “You’re ready to fire again? Already? I thought gravity weapons took a long time to cycle.”

  “Normally, yes. But this isn’t Phobos. Our weapon is far smaller and less powerful. It is, however, accurate and fast-loading.”

  “Perfect. Fire again.”

  The ship bucked, but not as badly this time. We didn’t go into a spin. Instead, we were thrown up toward the ceiling and then the thruster fired to counter the motion, and we were all slammed back down onto the deck again. In a way, the effect was worse because it was like getting hit from below and then from above by two hammers in rapid succession.

  Marvin followed my drifting body with a snaking camera. I ended up lying on the floor half under the command table.

  I looked up at his electric eye.

  “Are you conscious, Colonel Riggs?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a significant loss of bodily fluids…I believe you’re leaking, sir.”

  “I’ve got plenty of blood. Don’t worry about it.”

  “My apologies,” he said. “We’ll have to perfect the recoil compensation system before continuing to fire.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, climbing to my feet.

  All around me, staffers were rubbing their heads and pinching bloody noses. There was one lieutenant who wasn’t moving at all. Her head had slammed into the table and apparently she’d lost consciousness.