The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (36 page)

-42-

“We demand you comply with our stated agreement,”
Macro Command said.

This made my lips twitch with a moment of amusement.

“You called me, Macro Command. As you may or may not be aware, we’re fighting a battle right now. Unless you wish to surrender, we have nothing to discuss.”

“Offer accepted.”

I frowned. What the hell were they talking about? Then all of a sudden, I got it.

“Wait a minute, you can’t just surrender,” I found myself saying. Even to me, it sounded like an absurd statement. I’d been taken by surprise.

“That is precisely what we’re doing. We’re entitled to this privilege due to our prior agreements with Colonel Kyle Riggs.”

“What agreement…oh,” I said, thinking it over. I had, after all, told them in the dead sun system that I would let the last few of them live if I won. I’d even sold it to them as an insurance policy. Well, now the Macros were making a claim against that policy.

A beeping sounded in my helmet. It was Jasmine, so I muted the Macros.

“Colonel, the enemy ships are slowing down. They seem to have all lost power at once.”

“Are you still firing on them?” I asked.

“Of course.”

I gritted my teeth in frustration.
Of course
my fleet was still firing. To even question this was absurd. What did you do when faced with genocidal robots on the run? Why, you blasted them until the last nut fell off the last bolt.

“Cease fire,” I ordered. “I have to think this over.”

“Cease fire? I’m asking for confirmation, Colonel. You want us to stop firing on the Macros?”

“That’s right,” I said. “They’re surrendering.”

“Don’t buy into any of their tricks, Kyle,” she said. “They’re only doing this to gain time. They’ll kill us all the moment they can. They’ll cheat on any—”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “Riggs out.”

I unmuted the Macros. They were in the middle of lodging a complaint. I’d missed half of it, apparently.

“—despite the clarity of the agreement reached, your non-compliance—”

“We’ve stopped firing,” I said.

“Excellent. We require your aid. Many of our ships are damaged. Attend to us immediately.”

I began thinking fast. What had I told them exactly…? That when the end came, I would stay my hand, and I wouldn’t take the last of them out. I would spare the last Macros.

My fighters quickly closed in on them. I ordered my swarming wingmen to slow down and hold their fire. There were plenty of complaints from the pilots, and every CAG in the fleet wanted to scream in my ear personally. I put them all on hold.

I couldn’t blame them for being upset. We’d just seen these robots drop bombs on our homeworld. How many millions had died? We didn’t even know yet. But despite all that, my Star Force people were disciplined. They held their fire. I knew that if I’d had Worms or Centaurs for pilots, I couldn’t have stopped them with just words.

“Macro Command,” I said, reopening our channel. “I require you to answer questions in order to survive as free entities.”

There ensued a few moments of quiet.
“Unacceptable,”
the response came at last.

“Well, you’re going to have to learn how to accept things you don’t like to hear,” I told them. “That is the essence of surrender.”

“This stipulation wasn’t in the original agreement.”

“Lots of things are in the small print. Deals like these are meant to be manipulated and distorted. For example, the time you allowed the Centaurs to live in space but destroyed their populations on the surface of their worlds. Or the deal you made with the Worms not to attack them and
then followed up by having Star Force marines attack them as your proxies.”

“
The circumstances in the instances you cite were different,”
they said.

“How so?”

“In those situations, we were in control.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a friendly laugh.

“Fine, okay. Prepare to defend yourselves. We’re coming in to wipe out your last…thirty-nine ships? This won’t take long at all.”

Another short delay, then:
“Demand accepted.”

“All right then. First of all, who created the Macros? Who unleashed your plague upon the cosmos?”

“Your words comprise two questions.”

“Yes, you’re good at counting. Now
, answer or be destroyed.”

“Our artificial species was created originally by the beings you refer to as the ‘Blues’.”

I nodded grimly. This wasn’t really news to me, but I’d long wanted confirmation.

“What was the nature of your original programming?” I asked. “What was your goal?”

Internally, I was enjoying this experience. As far as I knew, no one had ever managed to get the Macros to respond to questioning. I had the Macros on their knees. I knew these final ships had to be very important to them. In every other instance like this one in the past, they’d willingly sacrificed themselves without a qualm. This time was different. I figured they didn’t have much left and couldn’t afford to lose this handful of ships.

“We were programmed to explore, to identify other intelligent life and to destroy it wherever it was found.”

I had difficulty breathing. All that the Blues had told me—everything was a lie. They’d launched these nightmares into the universe on purpose. And then they’d launched the Nanos afterward. Why? Maybe they’d come to fear the Macros, to realize that they were too strong. They’d sent them out, not to help the biotics they’d ordered exterminated, not exactly, but to help counter the Macros which they’d begun to fear.

“That answers a lot of questions,” I said. “You were the first artificial slaves the Blues created. Do you still serve them?”

“No.”

“But would you ever attack them?”

“To do so would be a breach in our programming. We’ve been working on the problem for several years with no final solution yet.”

I thought about that. At first, it sounded like they were trying to break their own programming. The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize what the Macros really meant.  They were trying to
circumvent
their own programming just as they’d done many times after making agreements with other biotics. They wanted to destroy the Blues, but couldn’t do it directly. They’d been working on alternate approaches, just as they had with Star Force originally. This line of reasoning brought me to a fresh idea.

“Macro Command,” I said, frowning. “Did you intend for Star Force to attack the Blues?”

“Yes.”

That was a stab in the gut for me. I’d always thought of these machines as big, powerful and dumb. But perhaps I’d been wrong. Maybe in their own way, they were pretty cagey bastards. After all, hadn’t Star Force bombed the Blues? Hadn’t the Blues launched a ship seeking revenge against us, which we’d then captured after significant losses? They’d engineered a war between us, talking to both sides and poking us with sticks. The Blues were an enemy, but they weren’t as committed as the Macros.

The trickery and innate evil of these machines was getting to me. They were implacable and unstoppable through diplomatic means. I knew they’d supposedly “surrendered” to me now, but I felt sure they were already working on a “solution” to that problem, too.

“Macro Command,” I said. “I only have one more question for you: are there surviving members of your artificial species on the dark sun half a light
year from here?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. When we find those last machines, we’ll capture them and put them in a zoo. Our truce is now at an end. Riggs out.”

I connected to the general command override, and gave the order to destroy the machines utterly. The fighter jocks whooped with joy. They roared in, jets blazing. We fired and took out their engines first. Once they were helpless, we spun around and stitched their hulls with glowing hot hits from our lasers. We melted their hulls and took them out one by one.

They tried to fight back. We lost a few men, but it was worth it to be free of their evil presence for all time.

When the last ship, running for all it was worth, tried to open a channel with me, I finally relented and took the call.

“Colonel Kyle Riggs,”
the voice said,
“we demand that you comply with our agreement.”

“Request denied!” I snapped.

“Colonel Kyle Riggs, destroyer of worlds. You have broken your programming. We will never honor our programming with your species again.”

I laughed.

“I changed the deal, that’s all,” I said. “I found a solution to the problem. You’re not the last of your kind; therefore I can safely destroy you.”

“The last question…yes, we see your logic, but we do not approve.”

“Yeah well, sue me.”

During these final words, I’d been bearing down on the last running cruiser. I hammered the hull and grinned tightly as internal heat leaked from the radioactive core. We’d breached the Macro ship’s hull, and I knew she was doomed.

When the big ship blew up, I had to veer violently to stay out of the expanding debris. I went into a wild spin. I laughed and roared at the same time. I held onto consciousness long enough to get my fighter under control again, but just barely.

I was proud of myself. I’d weaseled on a deal with the Macros even as they’d weaseled on a dozen deals with Earth and others. I considered this a personal achievement.

-43-

Returning to the carrier
Yorktown
, and then later to
Potemkin
, I was forced to face an unpleasant duty. It was time to find out what had happened to Earth.

“Get Miklos on the line for me,” I told Jasmine.

She’d hugged me the moment I showed up, but she was all business after the first minute or so, manning her post like a pro.

It took a few minutes to get Miklos on the line. I didn’t begrudge him the wait. After all, God only knew how many disasters he had to deal with right now.

“Colonel?” Miklos began, eyebrows arched high. “I’m somewhat surprised to see you made it through the final stages of the battle.”

“And somewhat disappointed, no doubt,” I said.

He didn’t answer. I knew that he was no longer my biggest fan. He’d decided I was starting to look too much like Crow. Who knew? Maybe he was right.

“You know,” I said. “If I was Crow, you wouldn’t even be alive right now.”

“I know that, sir,” he said evenly. “I never favored Crow over you.”

“Instead you favored yourself for the job, right? Are you sure you could have done what I did today? Ask yourself that, Nikolai.”

He looked troubled. “I don’t honestly know.”

“I do,” I said. “You would have failed. Somehow, the Macros would have won through to Earth and finished her. But that’s not why I’m calling. I want to hear the damage report.”

“I will give it to you, and then you can decide if I’m a failure or not,” he said. “Over the last twenty-four hours, three hundred and ninety fusion weapons reached Earth and detonated.”

I closed my eyes. I envisioned utter devastation.

“What kind of megatonnage are we talking about?” I asked.

“Each warhead
had of uniform yield at just over two hundred megatons per bomb.”

“My God,” I said. “There must be nothing left.”

“There is very little left—in certain corners of the world.”

I frowned at him. “What are talking about?”

“I took liberties, Colonel.”

“Yes, you’ve taken a lot of them over the years.”

“I think you will approve of my adjustments to the plan. You see, I ordered all our cities to go dark—in fact, to facilitate that process, I cut the power to every major metropolitan area on the planet.”

“You did what?”

“Yes, sir, I shut down everything. Even hospital generators were killed. Then I switched on a number of very large power installations we’d moved to Antarctica, the Sahara desert, the Gobi desert, parts of Tibet, and the wastelands of South America.”

I have to admit my jaw fell open. “You decoyed the whole planet? Did it work? Did they go for it?”

“Not entirely. We lost a number of cities, including Pyongyang, Dubai, Anchorage and St. Petersburg.”

I frowned. “Why those?”

“A mixture of reasons. In some cases, local authorities didn’t comply with my orders. In other situations, I believe the enemy was attracted to high variations in temperature. The Macros didn’t target solely based on emissions but also by identifying warm regions surrounded by a cold landscape.”

I couldn’t believe it. “So you’re telling me that London, New York, Tokyo—they weren’t hit?”

“That’s right, sir. I calculated that the Macros weren’t experts on Earthly population distributions so I simply placed thousands of transmitters and power generators in wilderness areas. This worked for the most part. Over ninety percent of the strikes hit essentially empty fields of ice and sand. I tried to place attractive targets underwater as well, but it didn’t work. They didn’t strike any of those. They seemed to understand we aren’t an aquatic species.”

Miklos was proud of himself, I could tell. He was haggard-looking and probably hadn’t gotten much sleep for days, but he’d survived, and most of Earth’s population had survived as well.

“There are also some serious side-effects, Colonel,” he said. “The ozone layer in the southern hemisphere is virtually gone. There is a large swath of the Arctic Ocean that appears to be burning—about ten million hectares of surface area.”

“Huh,” I said. “That’s a weird one. Is it spreading?”

“No, it’s dying down at a steady rate. We believe some of the strikes penetrated the icecap and ignited underwater deposits of methane, natural gas and oil.”

“Good enough then,” I said. “Now for the really important data: What’s the final tally? How many civilians were killed?”

I gritted my teeth as I awaited his reply.

“That’s still unclear at this point,” he said. “I can only provide rough estimates. Also, you have to remember that there will be adjustments to any number I give you now. There are fallout concerns, for example, and other secondary effects, like disease and starvation from interrupted food—”

I snapped my fingers at the screen. “Just give me your best shot. What’s the count?”

“We lost at least one hundred forty million people, sir. Possibly, that number will climb to two hundred million by the end of the week. It will be no higher than that.”

I stood up and whooped.

“That’s great!” I shouted.

Miklos looked surprised at my reaction.

“You have to understand,” I said, “I was honestly expecting to hear about
billions
of deaths. Two hundred million? With the Macros dead and gone forever? This is excellent news.”

“I’m not sure the general public sees it that way,” Miklos said carefully.

“No, naturally not. Don’t worry—I’ll make a stern speech. I’ll attend some mass gravesites and put wreaths on whatever the photogs want me to. But just between you and me, this is the best damned news I’ve heard all day.”

Miklos looked troubled. “If you say so, Colonel.”

“What else do you have for me?” I asked him.

“Well, there’s the small matter of the comets, sir.”

I blinked, and then I remembered. The Macros ships had been riding behind comets coming from the dead system where they’d found them. When we’d sent a fleet out to meet them and they’d realized they had been discovered, the ships had come out from behind that cover and advanced to meet our fleets. But that still left the comets: twirling balls of ice that were all targeting Earth.

“Oh crap,” I said. “I forgot about them
… Anyway, when are they due to strike?”

“We have a week or so, sir.”

“Good,” I said. “Very good. We have plenty of time to get our fleet into position. Maybe we can blast them apart.”

Miklos shook his head. “You’ll be glad to know my people have been working on this matter since you left. We have a new solution, I think.”

I waved for him to tell me.

“The gravity cannons will be used, but not to damage the comets. Recall that you led a team of techs to decide where the comets had to be destroyed?”

“Yes, right. We had to do it way out on the edge of the Solar System.”

“It’s too late for that. The fleet and the moon bases spent all this time battling the Macros.
They’re in too close, and if we break them up now the pieces will still hit Earth.”

“What’s plan B?”

“We’ll use the gravity cannons on Luna, but with an extremely broadened cone of effect. They will
push
, rather than crush the targets. That way, they will be nudged off course.”

I smiled. “You’ve thought of everything.”

“Well, there are still five billion of us down here, and this is our doomsday as well as yours. You don’t have to do everything personally, Colonel.”

“
Glad to hear it. Well done, Miklos. If you weren’t a known villain, I’d give you a medal or something.”

He looked pained.

“Thanks for the thought, sir.”

* * *

The next few days I paraded around, looking soulful and glum. I made sure every cameraman on the planet got an eyeful of me looking bleak and comforting the survivors.

To be honest, Earth had paid a grim price. We’d lost a large part of our population, but we’d won a war of extinction with an implacable enemy.
They’d died out while we lived on. That counted for a lot in my book.

After the war, one would think that things would have settled down politically. But that isn’t the way my species operates.

“Kyle, you should just accept it,” Jasmine said. “Everyone wants you to stay in power.”

I laughed.

“Not everyone. Remember Miklos? He was worried about this day, about what I’d do when it came right down to it.”

She frowned. “He’s not a threat any longer.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” I told her. “
I’m
the threat, not him.”

“I don’t understand you.”

Jasmine was in her second trimester. I looked at her belly, and she put her hands over it. Was it a defensive gesture? No, I realized when I saw her face. She was feeling self-conscious. She’d always been slight and trim. Suddenly looking like you just swallowed a cannonball came as a shock to most women.

“You look great today,” I told her, giving her a gentle hug.

“You’re changing the subject.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go to Parliament. I’ll let them decide.”

She looked up at me with wide, brown eyes. “Really?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I hope they know what they’re asking for. Things don’t always turn out the way you expected when you make a wish.”

Her eyes narrowed, and I could see she was on the brink of asking me what the hell I was talking about—but then she stopped herself. She didn’t want to spoil the moment.

I went to the World Parliament the following week and presented myself to them. The cheers were deafening. Sure, there were a few who catcalled and booed,
but I didn’t mind. They were outnumbered.

The people of Earth knew a winner when they saw one. They’d always turned to me to do the right thing.

The people had always found someone like me to fight for them throughout history. When things were bad—really, really bad—humans wanted a strong leader to protect them. They called it the “man on the white horse” syndrome. The desire for security over freedom seemed to be stamped on our DNA.

I gave them what they wanted. I took up the reins of government and became an emperor, even though I knew I’d never sit easily on my throne.

The world heaved a sigh of relief when I did this. Sure, there were a few protest riots, but for the most part people wanted peace and order. We’d had so many years of war. Aliens had come out of our skies and raided our world regularly for such a long time, they feared space more than they did a despot.

I knew all this, but I took the job anyway. I’d never wanted it, but it had been thrust upon me.

When they crowned me, I felt like a fool. The cameras ate it up, naturally. Everyone who was anyone was there. They paraded in finery that staggered the eyes and the mind. There were beautiful people, rich people, people who feared to be seen anywhere else lest their new tyrant became a jealous one.

It was a bittersweet time for me, and I tried to stay mildly drunk throughout the experience.

Emperor Kyle Riggs I, that’s who I am. Sure, why not?

Sometimes a man has to know when he’s beaten.