The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) (24 page)

“You know, Captain,” I said to her on the eighth night of pointless searching, “I think I’m beginning to understand you.”

We were in her office going over the collected data again, this time by hand. When surveying new planets, the diagnostic AI was only marginally effective at discovering something unusual. A combination of anomalies in a pattern might strike a chord in a human, while the computer passed it by.

It was tedious work. In general, we came up with odd readings—a released trace gas that shouldn’t be there or heat signatures that could be plate tectonics but might not be… By combining these elements, we hoped to find evidence of the Macros and their hiding spot. At least, that was the theory. The reality was that we were trapped in a room together, going over data that was as blank as blank could be. It was extremely boring.

“Understand me?” she asked. “What do you mean, Colonel?”

“You behave differently when it’s just you and me here in this office.”

She stiffened, and her eyes met mine. “I hope you aren’t suggesting anything improper might transpire, sir.”

I blinked at her then laughed. “No, no, not at all. Do I have that bad of a reputation?”

“Yes.”

I chuckled again. She wasn’t one to candy things up.

“All I meant was that you’re more open and more willing to talk in this office. In front of your crew, you’re all business.”

Her eyes drifted back down to the data again. “And what is it you’re beginning to understand about that?”

“Why you operate the way you do. Why you never let your guard down on the bridge. I think you’re worried they won’t respect you if you’re anything less than a stickler for every rule. I would suggest to you it might not be necessary.”

She looked unhappy and avoided my eye.

“Everyone has their own command style,” I said, backpedaling a bit. “I’m not here to judge. I’m just telling you that you might be making things harder on yourself than is necessary.”

“I thank you for your concern.”

I shrugged. I could tell her crew might be happier if she lightened up, but I wasn’t going to push it. She was the captain, and she was effective. It was her ship.

“Sir?” she asked a few minutes later.

I looked up at her, and the expression on her face made me think she was about to open up and tell me her problems. Usually, that sort of look sent me running for the hills, but Nomura was growing on me.

“What is it, Captain?”

“I’ve been going over the paths all of our search parties have taken thus far. We’ve covered eighty percent of the system.”

“Unfortunately, yes. We’ve found very little of interest, and we’ve pretty much wasted our time. Is that what you were about to say?”

“Not exactly, sir. It occurs to me now that there’s one major body no ship was assigned to.”

I frowned. “What?”

“The sun, sir. Or what once might have been the sun in this system.”

I thought about it. “The gravity would be too intense for enemy activity. At least, that was the assumption.”

“Do we know the gravitational stresses the Macros can handle?”

I shook my head. “Not really. We’d sort of bypassed it automatically…but now that you mention it—”

I stood up, and she stood up with me. We were on the same page.

“We’re going to the bridge, and we’re reversing course,” I said. “Every ship in the fleet is threading their way outward along a unique path from rock to rock. But we’re going to return and check out the biggest rock of them all.”

“An excellent idea, Colonel,” she said. Her eyes were intense.

The longer I was around this woman, the more I liked her. She wanted to complete the mission. That’s all she wanted. She would do just about anything to achieve that goal.

I could appreciate that kind of officer.

-27-

The moment I relayed our plans to fleet command, they objected. Despite their resistance, they weren’t surprised to learn I’d already put my hunch into action.

“I’m not asking permission, Jasmine,” I said. “I’m informing you. What I need from you is a little rerouting. Have nearby task forces add our final planetary stops to their search lists. If you spread the job around, it should add no more than a day to our total time here. In the meantime, I’ll have a few days to scour the surface of the dead sun.”

“Sir,” Jasmine said, looking worried on my screen. “I don’t recommend this course of action. Your ship might not even be able to withstand the pull of the collapsed core. If anything overheats or malfunctions, you might not escape the gravity well.”

“The gravitational forces are well within specs. I checked. And
Andoria
is a new ship. She has the best equipment we can produce.”

“The situation is untested, sir.”

I frowned. She didn’t want me to go down there and risk my life ahead of the pack. She thought of it as unnecessarily endangering key personnel—and the guy who happened to be the father of her unborn child. Could she be losing her edge?

I didn’t see things that way. What right did I have to order crews onto a dangerous path I wouldn’t dare to take myself? It was different in battle, of course. A commander owed it to everyone to stay alive. But we weren’t in battle—not yet anyway—and I was becoming increasingly determined to see this through. We had to find the Macros and destroy their base as fast as possible.

“Jasmine,” I said, “the Macros are somewhere in this system. I can feel it. This might be a longshot, but I want to take it.”

“I understand, Colonel,” she said in resignation. “I’ll relay the orders to the rest of the fleet.”

The channel broke, and I turned back to Nomura. I grinned at her.

“It’s a go!”

She looked at me curiously. “So I heard, sir.”

I wondered vaguely what she was thinking. Had she picked up on the odd interchange between Jasmine and I? Was she aware of the rumors, most of which were true, about our relationship?

I decided it didn’t matter, and I didn’t care. I stood tall on the bridge while it seesawed under my boots. It felt good to be turning around, to follow a hunch.

* * *

A day later, I found myself orbiting the dead sun. It wasn’t a normal smooth orbit, however. We were too close for that. We had to keep the engines on full to stay aloft, and there was a thin dusty atmosphere around the monster that was dangerously close to scorching the hull with friction if we drifted down any closer.

It didn’t take long to find what we were looking for. The emissions had been too faint to pick up deep in space, but up close they were clear: there was an energy dome on the surface of this rock.

We’d found this type of base many times in the past. It was a Macro dome—an extremely large one. Nearly ten miles across, it doubtlessly was protecting their most valuable assets: their factories.

“I’m impressed,” I told Captain Nomura as I studied the readouts. “They built it
here
, in plain sight. But such a crazy place for a base! Every ship they launch must have to blast away under full power to escape the gravity well. It seemed impossible, and we almost passed them by.”

“Maybe that’s why they did it,” she said.

“Maybe,” I admitted. “But I don’t think so. I think they have some other reason. A rare local resource, perhaps. They normally don’t build their bases with subterfuge and deception in mind. They aren’t great hiders—they always think aggressively.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t even nod. Nomura was an odd commander. I liked her, but I had a hard time figuring out what she was thinking.

Macros liked to build their factories under heavy energy shielding to prevent orbital bombardment. Only nuclear weapons could take one down. Grinning, I ordered the bombardment to begin.

“Let’s unload, Captain. Send down every missile we have on three sides of that dome. That amounts to forty-eight warheads.”

Nomura didn’t argue with me. She didn’t tell me I was wasting ordnance, or that I should hold back in case we found a second dome. She tapped in the targeting data, transferred it to the other two cruisers, and they all fired in rapid succession.

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.