The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (14 page)

-14-

We all thought the battle was over when the last Macro cruiser turned into a fountain of plasma and shrapnel. But it wasn’t.

Those seventy-odd missiles kept coming at us. I’d pretty much discounted them until they started slowing down and taking complex countermeasures.

“Sir,” Newcome said, calling me from the bridge.

“What is it, Admiral?”

“I think you better come up here.”

I’d been taking a sip of coffee down in the cantina, wishing it was beer. I stood up with a grunt. Kwon stood up with me.

“What is it?” he asked. “Something’s gone wrong? That’s it, I can tell!”

He sounded eager to fight. He’d missed out during the last battle. The last Macro cruiser had died before it had reached cannon-range. He’d asked to go out with the marines, but I hadn’t let him. I didn’t want to risk losing a key man on a fight that was pretty much a foregone conclusion.

I had to admit that sometimes Kwon’s lust for battle was disturbing. A normal man wouldn’t be all turned—on about a chance to face death, but Kwon never got tired of it.

“Maybe,” I said, giving him a tight smile. “Trouble on the bridge. But it might just be Newcome acting nervous again. He needs babysitting more than most officers.”

“Babysitting, ha ha!” Kwon shouted, enjoying the joke more loudly than I would have liked.

“You want to tag along?” I asked him.

“Would love to, sir!”

He followed me all the way up the main passage, and we pressed our way through the nanite door. Right away, I could tell the mood was all wrong. The staffers were bustling, but quietly. The jubilant mood left by our recent victory had vanished.

“Brief me, Newcome,” I said. “And this had better not be some kind of a screw-up on your part.”

“Hardly, Colonel,” he said huffily. “The enemy has employed sophisticated countermeasures. Their missiles are still coming, and we aren’t going to be able to stop them.”

Narrowing my eyes, I surveyed the boards and the holotank. The enemy missiles were already in range, and I could see we were taking potshots at them with lasers.

“Why are we missing?” I said, watching a steady series of stabbing beams reach out from our fleet in flickering lines which intersected the enemy missiles neatly. Each time they did so, there seemed to be no appreciable effect.

“Technically, we’re
not
missing, sir. The enemy has deployed a particularly effective aerosol. It is prismatic, highly reflective and stubbornly difficult to burn through. Unlike chaff, there doesn’t seem to be any end to it, and we can’t burn through it. Even direct hits are having no effect on the enemy missiles.”

I nodded. “I can see that our fighters aren’t going to return in time to help.”

“It will all be over hours before we retrieve them. We’re reducing the fleet’s speed in order to do so, but it won’t help.”

“What about Marvin?” I asked. “Can’t he zero in on these missiles and crush them for us as he did the fleet?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“What about using our own missiles against these incoming birds? Have we got anything left?”

He shook his head. “We threw it all into destroying their ships. We’re on our own. We’ll have to ride out this attack without the fighters or missiles.”

I frowned, looking it over. Jasmine arrived, and she rushed to the table. Her eyes swept over the scene, and she nodded in understanding.

“I have received a message from Marvin, Colonel,” she said.

I looked at her expectantly.

She shook her head. “He won’t be able to help. The moment the last Macro cruiser was destroyed, he launched from the Sun Factory and headed back toward our fleet. Really, we can’t be angry with him about that. He completed his mission perfectly.

“It wasn’t quite over with yet,” I grumbled. But, after thinking about it, I shrugged.

“Looks like they’re going to tag us, people,” I said loudly. “Really, we had to expect this. We could hardly hope to get through a fight like this one without a scratch. Seventy missiles will hurt, and they will probably take out a few ships. But if we all—”

“Sir?” Newcome interrupted me.

I looked at him, frowning.             

“There’s more to it than that. The enemy missiles are slowing as they come in close. They are, in fact, matching our velocity and deceleration arc.”

It took me a second to get what he was saying. “You’re telling me they aren’t missiles at all. That these are assault ships?”

He nodded. I looked at Jasmine.

“That would fit the profile of behavior, sir,” she said.

For the first time, I felt a twinge of worry.

“How far are we from the ring to the Eden System?”

“About an hour away, Colonel.”

“What if we sped up again? What if we zoomed right through the ring and made it home as fast as possible?”

They were both working on the numbers. Glimmering lines curved on the screens, projecting new paths.

“We could do it in half that time.”

“Thirty minutes…and the enemy missiles—um, assault ships, will speed up again to catch us, I’m sure. But that might screw up their little protective clouds. Let’s do it. Fleet, I want every ship in the task force to accelerate, all ahead full. If we make it to the ring while they’re landing on our hulls, the guns of Welter Station can pick them off.”

I didn’t have to ask twice. I could tell by the speed of the response Jasmine had already tapped in the order. She was always on top of these things. I was glad I’d brought her along.

The ship’s decking lurched under my feet. A painful, growing weight caused by the acceleration pressed upon me, too much for the grav plates to compensate for.

The next twenty minutes were rough. The missiles gave chase, and we fired everything we had left at them. Unfortunately, I’d unloaded all my missiles, fighters and marines to meet the ships themselves.

It soon became clear we weren’t going to make it to the ring before they caught up to us. We weren’t going to be able to stop them.

“Sixty-eight left?” I demanded incredulously. “Are you telling me we only got a handful of them with all that fire? That means their anti-laser systems are far better than ours. This is actually depressing news. We surprised them with the gravity weapon, and it was a damned good thing we did. These ships would have mopped up the floor with us. They would have deployed these defensive measures to protect their cruisers when we got into range with our main guns, I’m sure. I’m shocked at their technological advancement.”

“Sir,” Newcome said. “Maybe that’s why they have so few ships. It’s been a long time since we met up with the Macros. Maybe they spent their time upgrading weaponry rather than building more vessels.”

I nodded. “I have to concede that possibility. It fits the facts, but we may never know the truth. It does, however, emphasize our need for technological advancement. We can’t have a bunch of machines out-teching us. It’s downright embarrassing. I want samples after this is over—presuming we survive. Transmit every measurement we’ve taken to Welter Station, and have them relay that to Earth.”

“We can’t do that right now, Colonel,” Jasmine said.”

“Why not?”

“They’re jamming the rings again.”

I growled. “The Macros and the Blues are in coordination yet again. What a pair of devils. I tell you, I’ve still got half a mind to erase the Blues while we can.”

At this, several pairs of eyes looked up at me. Only Kwon didn’t appear to take note. He was tapping at one small corner of the boards, where he was checking his troop rosters. I approved as he was arranging defensive operations on the ships. That was his job, and he always stuck to his job rather than getting upset about whatever I said.

The rest of them looked worried. I heaved a sigh.

“No, I’m not going to order you to commit genocide no matter how much the Blues deserve it. I’m just annoyed with them. We have to make it painful to them when they pull stunts like this. Possibly, that entire line they gave me about sharing matter and me being doomed was bullshit meant to cover for the fact they really just wanted to give the Macros their marching orders.”

“What did they say about being doomed?” Jasmine asked in concern.

“Never mind about that. They never talk to me without throwing in a few oddball threats. Let’s get back to the battle at hand. Kwon, where are you setting up your marines?”

“Center of each ship, main passage between the bridge and engineering.”

I nodded. “Tell every crew to keep the engines burning. I don’t want them crawling in that way. Once they get off their damned missiles we’ll take some shots at them. Each ship can try to burn individual machines off his neighbor’s hull.”

“Good idea!” Kwon shouted. “It will be like picking fleas off your neighbor’s back—but try to leave a few for my men. We need practice.”

I knew Kwon really meant he wanted to have some fun fighting with the machines personally, but I didn’t argue with him. Our gunners and brainboxes would not need my encouragement to fire when the enemy was swarming on hulls. They probably wouldn’t have listened if I’d told them to go easy on the machines, in any case.

When the machines finally did hit us, it wasn’t loud or flashy. They came in, unloaded marines that looked like headless grasshoppers, and all we heard was the clank and rasp of their feet on the hulls.

It was impossible not to look up at the ceiling when you heard that sound.

“It’s been a long time,” I said.

“It sure has,” Kwon said, cradling his projector and checking his charge for the tenth time. “Too long.”

Up until that point, nothing had really gone wrong. I’d known for twenty minutes that they would catch us, and I knew those missiles were full of enemy marines. If they couldn’t find a way in for the next ten minutes, we’d slip through the ring and find ourselves in home space. Welter Station had lasers that dwarfed anything that my ships had. Even if they had their own personal aerosol shields up by then, I was confident our big guns would burn through it without a problem.

I was beginning to think we were going to ride this one out. At that moment, something new went wrong.

“Sir, we have a hull breach,” Jasmine said.

“What? Already?”

She’d hardly had to tell me. The screens were flashing red. Our exterior view of space and the Thor System flashed away and was replaced by a diagram of our ship. Up forward, about ten meters from the nose itself, the breach appeared as a dark hole surrounded by red warping radiating lines.

“They’ve got something new. They’re cutting through our hull as if it’s paper.”

I watched for a second, fascinated. Then I turned to Kwon. “They’re getting inside. Let’s go.”

“Colonel!” Jasmine said in alarm.

I paused.

“You don’t have to go personally. We still have a complement of defensive troops and crewmen. Let them do their jobs.”

Kwon laughed. She looked at him coldly.

“You should know him better than that by now!” Kwon said, marching into the passageway. He shouted orders to the squad of troops that waited there.

I paused, seeing the worried look in Jasmine’s eye. I hugged her lightly, not wanting to crush her with my exoskeletal armor. Her Fleet uniform was like paper compared to my gear.

I kissed the top of her head. “If they get to the engine core, we’re all dead anyway. Make sure every crewmember suits up. This might be a fight to the finish.”

She turned away, eyes glistening with emotion. She began shouting orders and handed over fleet ops to Admiral Newcome. There was precious little to do in that regard now.

The enemy had penetrated the hull of every ship in the task force. Most were only graced with a dozen invading marines. But, as we were on the only battleship in the fleet, we’d gotten around a hundred uninvited visitors.

This fight was to the finish now, I told myself. More than once, I’d invaded Macro ships and taken them from their rightful owners.

Maybe the machines thought it was payback time.

-15-

They came in like a swarm of bees. We were never quite sure how they breached the hull, but they seem to have some kind of new energy drill on the nose of specialized Macro marines. One in every sixteen of them had been built with this singular purpose in mind: to break into an enemy ship.

“A bomb would have been so much easier,” Kwon said as he trotted in front of me toward the breached zone.

Gamma deck had a hole in it, as did the aft region near engineering. We’d assigned ourselves defensive duty at the Gamma breach since it was closer to our starting position at the bridge. Another squad of defensive troops was heading to engineering. They weren’t marines, but Star Force Fleet people can put up a good fight when you put them in armor and tell them to defend their ship. I had high hopes for them.

“Yeah,” I said, huffing a bit when we reached a ladder and vaulted through an access point in the bulkhead. “A big bomb shoved through the hull is always easier. But their methods are effective, and they’re doing a lot less damage by drilling small holes than explosives would. I can see the beauty in their system. They’re designed to capture our ships rather than destroy them.”

Kwon craned his body around to look at me. I could see his face through this visor, and he wore a grimace of disbelief.

“Beauty? There’s nothing pretty about these metal bugs, Colonel. They’re evil machines. That’s all. About as beautiful as a dentist’s drill.”

“Yeah…” I said, letting him win the point. There was no use in trying to get Kwon to understand a designer’s viewpoint. He wasn’t a programmer or an engineer. He specialized in blowing things up rather than creating them.

But I’d always been impressed by Macro technology. It was so functional, so pure. There was no waste, no frills. If a cube-shaped object did the job, you got a cube out of them. No decorations or markings: A perfect cube.

That’s what these invasion robots were. They’d been carefully designed to do a specific job, and they were doing it very well. If I’d been forced to admit it, I’d have to say they were kicking our asses.

“I hate machines,” Kwon said as he crouched and scuttled forward on his knees.

It was an awkward pose for any armored man, but when Kwon did it he looked like a metal beetle.

“Are you sure?” I asked, crawling after him and looking for the enemy. “What about your weapons and your suit? Do you hate them too?”

Around us a dozen troops crawled on their bellies. Gamma Deck wasn’t like most of them. It wasn’t even a full-sized deck. It was more like a layer of equipment and tubing to support the decks below and above it. Rather than nice flat corridors and hatchways, it was a maze of piping and machinery. Usually only maintenance people came down here.

“You know what I mean, sir,” Kwon whispered, scanning the dark clutter around us for any sign of the enemy. “I’m talking about smart machines. I hate them.”

“Even Marvin?” I asked. “If it hadn’t been for his gravity-hammer, we’d have lost this fight and be dead and floating by now.”

“Yeah, you got me there. I don’t hate Marvin. He worries me, and I don’t always like him—but I don’t hate him. Okay, so I hate all machines except for—”

That was as far as he got. I was surprised, really, that the enemy had let us this close. They opened up from their positions where they’d lain in ambush as we crawled toward them.

There were sixteen of them and sixteen of us. The enemy was organized into four diamond-shaped teams of four. I counted their guns as they flared yellow-white, ripping apart the gloom. The equipment and piping around me popped, melted and sizzled.

Sixteen guns was the same size as my squad. I had a wild thought then: I should institute reforms upping our unit sizes slightly. That way we’d always outnumber them.

It was a silly idea, but you never know what might be going through your mind when the fireworks start. Usually, I didn’t think about much other than staying alive and killing the enemy. However, sometimes I experienced flashes of sights and sounds from my past, or memories of home – especially if I took a hit and felt stunned.

“Left flank,” Kwon shouted suddenly, “hunker down. Right flank, give them covering fire. The enemy is concentrating left. You know the drill, stick to it.”

He was a first-class fighter and a great sergeant. The men had just the right level of fear mixed with respect for him. I don’t think they feared him physically even though he dwarfed most of them. They feared his reputation, and the number of fights he’d walked away from, leaving dead comrades and enemies strewn behind. It was hard not to be intimidated by facts like that.

I agreed with his tactical decisions, and as I was on the left flank, I hunkered down with the rest of them. A storm of laser bolts burned the air over our heads. The entire crowded region of Gamma Deck was filling with wisps of smoke as lasers vaporized metal. Hit or miss, almost everything down here was metal.

“They’re shifting to hit us on the right now, sir,” Kwon said. “And I haven’t counted any kills yet. They have heavier front plating than they used to, I think.”

“Okay, let’s change things up a little. Hand grenades, I want them all tossed at once.”

“Sir, I don’t think that’s such a—”

“Frag out!” I shouted, pressing a stud and throwing my grenade into the face of the enemy who had taken this opportunity to scuttle forward. We were busy ducking, and they were trying to get in close.

“Throw one each, men!” I ordered over the command channel.

The men didn’t hesitate. They pulled out their tactical grenades, armed them with a click of their thumbs and lobbed them toward the enemy.

These grenades didn’t behave like the old-fashioned dumb weapons. We’d done a little bit of design work ourselves over the years. These were smart grenades. They had onboard magnetometers, tiny brainboxes and even propulsion systems. Essentially, they were tiny, suicidal drones. Programmed to seek and destroy Macro-sized metal objects, they homed in and exploded, not on a timer and a fuse, but rather like tiny mines seeking ships in space.

Explosions blossomed. A moment later, I stood up, and the men around me cheered.

Only two of the machines had survived. We’d wiped them out. We concentrated fire and melted the last two. They took a lot more heat to burn down than usual, and I was certain they had new armor. But the last one finally died, scrabbling and kicking like a bug touched by a match.

“We only lost one man, Kwon!” I shouted.

“Yeah, but you took out that big box over there.”

I followed his outstretched hand and frowned. “Hmm,” I said. “It is about the size and weight of a Macro. Someone’s grenade must have gotten confused.”

“They told me not to use grenades down here on Gamma,” Kwon complained. “They said I would wreck something critical.”

“Well, it was my call,” I said. “I’d say it was the right one. After all, we took them out fast.”

I broke off in surprise. “Huh…I’m floating now.”

We all were.

“I think the ship’s gravitational system is dead, sir,” Kwon said.

“Yeah, dammit.”

We were in free-fall. As the damaged device died, things went from bad to worse.
Potemkin
wasn’t just gliding along through space, after all. The entire fleet was still accelerating, and now we could feel the full weight of that acceleration.

Men tumbled and grunted, falling toward the aft bulkhead. Gamma Deck was filled with a lot of obstacles and darkness, and the limited space was crowded with men, equipment and dead Macros.

It was a mess. Men grunted and shouted curses. Visors starred and some troops were pinned under a mass of struggling bodies.

I was one of the unlucky ones. Two Macro hulks crashed down on top of me at the far end of the deck. Fortunately, I was already connected via com-link to the bridge.

“Bridge? This is Riggs. Kill the engines. We’re no longer being pursued. Coast. Do not decelerate or accelerate. I repeat—”

“Colonel?” Jasmine’s voice asked in my ear. “What did you do down there? I see your location—Gamma Deck.”

“That’s correct. Could you shut off the engines, please?”

“They’re cycling down now. It will be a few minutes.”

I cursed and complained inside my helmet. I was glad I was wearing hardshell armor, as I would have been crushed otherwise. Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, the pressure eased, and we all started floating again.

“Colonel?” Jasmine was saying again. “Could you get to engineering? They’re having trouble down there. We might lose the deck.”

“Roger that, I’m on my way. Tell them relief is coming and to fight a defensive battle until the marines arrive.”

I thought about my relatively untrained fleet people fighting with these new-and-improved Macro killing machines. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

“Message relayed, sir,” Jasmine said. “And Kyle, did you wreck my ship?”

“Uh—Kwon did it.”

“I should have known!” she said, and broke off.

Kwon drifted closer to me when I flipped back to proximity chat. “What did she say? Is she pissed? You blew a hole in her baby, and women never forget that kind of thing, you know.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling a little guilty about blaming Kwon. “I know. But don’t worry. She’ll get over it.”

We hustled aft through a system of hatchways and worked our way to the rear of the ship.

“Colonel?” Jasmine called me again. “You have to hurry.  They’ve engaged and are taking losses. They can’t use grenades without wrecking the engines.”

“We’ll be there in sixty seconds.”

When engineering was right below our position on Gamma Deck, I ordered my men to break through the deck-plates in unison.

This maneuver isn’t as hard as it sounds. In many places on a modern cruiser, our decking was built with smart materials holding together the larger sheets of pure metal. If you went to a joint, and had the right security codes, you could break through into whatever was on the far side just by telling the nanites to let go.

So when we did storm through, we did it all at once. An avalanche of marines came falling out of the ceiling of the engineering deck along with dislodged deck plates and drifting clouds of constructive nanites. They’d been the glue between the plates for so long they didn’t seem to know what to do when ordered to release in zero G. They formed swirling swarms that looked like tiny tornadoes of metal filings.

We unloaded on the machines point-blank. We were in their midst, and we made a happy discovery: their improved armor was only effective in the front. That made sense as it would have been difficult to armor up every machine without weighing it down so much it couldn’t move.

Caught from the sides and rear, our lasers punched through their hulls and burned their guts out before they could do much. In the entire action, we only lost one man who was gored to death by a thrashing machine in its death throes.

The Fleet people, unfortunately, weren’t so lucky. They’d been wiped out.

“We were too slow,” I said, checking each armored corpse for vitals.

“I found one alive here!” Kwon shouted.

We gathered around and helped stabilize a dying midshipman. The woman wouldn’t see action for weeks, but she’d live.

The rest were dead: About thirty of them.

“They fought bravely,” I said. “But these new lasers—the burns are terrible.”

Kwon banged his gauntlet on my back. I rocked in my armor.

“We can’t live forever, sir,” he said. “We won. We saved the ship. That’s what counts.”

“Yeah,” I said, still frowning.

I almost found it odd that the battle bothered me. I’d seen a lot of action in my time, more than most men have in a lifetime, but I still didn’t like to see a unit wiped out. That part of my life had never become routine.