The Dead Sun

by B. V. Larson

  “Sir,” Miklos began again, “it is critical that we deploy gravity cannons similar to the one Marvin created in the Thor System to handle this new oncoming threat.”

  “I get that,” I said. “But you’re going to have to engineer it without Marvin’s help. He’ll be hitting the Macros with me.”

  “But what if he’s destroyed?” Jasmine asked.

  Marvin’s cameras perked up like a German Shepard’s ears in response to her question.

  “Do you think that’s likely?” he asked.

  Jasmine glanced at him. “Failure is always a possibility. Just ask the Crustacean population in the Thor System.”

  “That would not be possible. There are no longer any Crustaceans living in the—”

  “That’s my point, robot. That operation was a failure, and they all died.”

  “Oh,” Marvin said. “I understand your reference now. File updated.”

  “Look,” I said, getting angry. “First of all, they didn’t all die. They have a viable population doing well on Eden-6. Besides which, we aren’t going to fail.”

  “But it is a matter of timing, sir,” Miklos said. “We don’t have much time to duplicate Marvin’s work.”

  I shook my head. “I refuse to believe all of Earth’s engineers can’t do what he did in just a few weeks. You’ll have the benefit of his data and designs. We’ll give you the blueprints.”

  “Still, I don’t think that—”

  “What do you want me to do? Clone Marvin? Make a copy of his brain?”

  Everyone paused at that idea. The moment I said it, I regretted it. That was something Sandra had warned me against, and I have to admit I was still in agreement with her on that point. She’d wondered if humanity would become redundant if a machine intelligence like Marvin became commonplace.

  I’d immediately seen that she had a good point. In all our limited travels throughout the universe, we’d met up with two types of sentient beings. One type was alive, and the other type was made up of sophisticated machines. In every case except for one, these two forms of being were in conflict. Only Marvin, so far as I knew, worked with living creatures. All the other intelligent machines were out to destroy us.

  I didn’t want to risk creating a new species of robot that might compete with my race in the future. We’d seen enough of that already. The Blues had apparently made that mistake already—twice.

  “That’s an intriguing concept, Colonel Riggs,” Marvin said. “I have considered it before, in fact.”

  I looked at him warily. We all did. Marvin was not entirely under our control. He wasn’t under anyone’s control. For all I knew, he’d already gone off somewhere and spawned a brood of mini-Marvins.

  He studied us, and we studied him. I didn’t say anything. I did wonder just exactly what he was thinking at that moment. What was he really thinking?

  “As I said,” he continued after a moment. “I considered the idea, and I discontinued the project.”

  I heard a few sighs of relief.

  “Why, Marvin?” asked Gaines.

  “I suppose one might call it a matter of pride. I rather enjoy being a unique creature. If I copied myself, I would no longer be one of a kind, and there is the fact that if I did it once, my copy would be likely to do it again. Imagine, countless Marvins running around. It doesn’t bear thinking about.”

  I squinted at him, trying to follow his logic.

  “So…you want to remain a species of one so that you don’t have any competition?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “You got the concept immediately. I’m impressed as usual, Colonel Riggs. You see, if there were two Marvins, would they both be invited to this meeting? Would they both be members of Star Force? What would be the second Marvin’s name? With living beings, these matters are simpler. You create a child, but that child isn’t an exact copy, and it is behind you in time and social stature. That wouldn’t be the case with my offspring. They would be as competent as I am the moment I made them.”

  I chewed the inside of my cheek then nodded. “I think you’ve made the right decision in that case, Marvin,” I said.

  Internally, I was hoping he never changed his mind on this point.

  “Miklos will have to build his gravity cannons without you,” I said. “You are the single robot in all of Star Force, and the most accomplished scientific mind on my team. There’s only one Marvin, and that’s plenty.”

  Marvin beamed—which, for him, consisted of lifting his outlying cameras higher and increasingly the idle motion of his tentacles. I was glad to see he liked the praise. I wanted to heap it on higher, but I didn’t want my tactic to become obvious.

  None of us wanted more Marvins around. It was important that he agree with us on that point—and that he thought it was his decision.

  -20-

  It took more than two days to pull the fleet together. In fact, it took several days. I decided to help with some of the engineering problems while we waited.

  I assigned Marvin to get a team together and teach them how to make new gravity weapons like the one he’d built out in the Thor System. They’d have to place them near Sol, and I gave them permission to tear up the surface of Mercury to gather mass to be converted into stardust. There wasn’t any other source of matter close enough.

  I had to wonder as I signed the orders that doomed one of our few planets if some preservationist society would hang me in effigy for this someday. I shrugged. If enough humans were still around after the coming battle to second-guess me, I’d done my job right.

  Like Marvin, I pulled together an engineering team. Mine was located on Andros Island, the traditional headquarters of Star Force.

  I liked being back in the tropics. It felt homey. I’d been away for so long, I took a few hours each day to stroll on the island’s beaches, but those hours were rare and stolen.

  I walked the sands with a recorder at my lips. Any thought, any notation was dictated into it and translated into text for later perusal. I worked even while I was supposed to be relaxing.

  My engineering people were mostly young, fat-brained kids out of the best companies and institutions. I had a few older professor-types, but most of them had barely seen the ink dry on their second Ph. D.

  “Let’s talk about handling the comets themselves first,” I said, “as we can see exactly what they have in that department. What do we have to do to blow those things down?”

  “Shoot them down?” asked one guy, a skinny kid with hunched shoulders and a twitchy face.

  “It’s not that simple,” another, older fellow with a full beard said. He couldn’t stop tugging on that beard. “Remember the Shoemaker-Levy comet of 1994? It hit Jupiter, and it broke up before impact. If anything, it did more damage in twenty-one pieces than it would have done as a single mass.”

  “What’s your solution then?” I asked him.

  The older fellow with the beard shrugged.

  I glared at them all. This was how it had been going for hours.

  “All I’m getting is resistance and lists of fresh problems,” I told them. “I’m interested in solutions, people! The next guy who opens his mouth to give me something new to worry about is getting shot.”

  I pulled out my sidearm and placed it on the table in front of me. Every eye in the place zoomed in on it. I didn’t have any takers.

  Finally, a hand from the back timidly rose up.

  “What have you got?” I demanded.

  “If we can destroy the enemy comets far enough out and break them into small chunks, the sun should burn them up before they reach us. Comets are really trails of melting vapor. The reason we don’t see them when they’re far out in the Solar System is they’re stable. When they get in close, they start to boil away.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. I reached out, picked up my sidearm and watched everyone wince. I put it away slowly.

  “That’s a good idea,” I said.

  Visible relief swept the nerd colony.

  “Let’s
work with that concept,” I said. “We’ll break the comets down into small chunks. Small chunks of ice have more surface area and therefore melt faster when heat is applied. Let’s assume we managed to break them up as much as Shoemaker-Levi was broken up when it hit Jupiter. In that state, how long before the individual pieces melt down to something we can handle?”

  I looked around. They all had their computing devices out and were tapping at them like mad. They seemed much happier now that they had a physics problem to work on. That sort of thing could be solved. I’d learned over time that engineers preferred a straightforward question with a quantifiable answer. Open-ended designing, on the other hand, was the realm of programmers. Many people had trouble doing one or the other, even though, to outsiders, it all looked like the same sort of incomprehensible scribbling. This group leaned toward the math and engineering side of the house.

  “Anyone got a calculation for me? Let’s go!” I clapped my gauntlets together, causing a booming report to echo from the walls. They all jumped. I’d learned that one from Kwon.

  The original kid who’d presented the idea lifted his hand again. I stabbed a finger at him.

  “These numbers aren’t solid, sir. There are so many variables, and we’d want to be very sure given the stakes—”

  “Come on, come on. Just give it to me.”

  “I’d say we’d have to take them out at about thirty AU—that’s about as far away as the orbit of Neptune.”

  “Good,” I said, “now we have a goal. Let’s move on to how we can achieve that goal. What kind of force, how many warheads, what megatonnage? That’s what I need to know.”

  The kid’s hand was up again. He looked scared. I waved for him to speak.

  “What if I’m wrong, sir? It was only a quick estimate. I don’t want—”

  “Son,” I said, chuckling. “Don’t worry about that. If you screwed up, these guys will let you know it very fast. They hate you right now for beating them to the answer. Their pride is stung. They would love to prove you wrong.”

  The kid looked around at his colleagues questioningly.

  “And that’s a good thing,” I added. “That’s how we engineering types get it right. We check one another’s work. We compete to be right. We hate to be wrong, and we hate it when the next guy looks smarter than we do, even for a second. All our pride is wrapped up in our big brains.”

  There were smiles and a few laughs at that.

  I smiled back briefly.

  “So, to get on with it... How are we going to break down these massive chunks of icy death before they get past Neptune?”

  They worked, and I rode them, and the process went all day long. When dinnertime came, I called in food. There was lots of protein in the form of meat and lots of caffeinated drinks. I gave them all they could swallow.

  After dinner, the nightshift began. A few of them looked uncomfortable. I could tell they were wondering just when they might be allowed to go home.

  “Getting tired?” I asked one yawner at about nine pm.

  She nodded.

  “Have any kids at home?” I asked her.

  Surprised, she shook her head.

  I walked among them. They tensed up as I passed them and shied away from contact with my person. I didn’t blame them. I had that over-developed body-builder look going on. The nanites and microbes had worked on me, sculpting me even if I never hit the gym. Since I did work out regularly, I was quite capable of killing everyone in the room with my bare hands before they could do anything about it. They knew this, and they acted like a tiger was stalking down the rows of seats, lashing its tail. I did nothing to dissuade them from this impression.

  “Do any of you have kids?” I asked again, loudly.

  A smattering of hands went up.

  “Good,” I said. “If you don’t have kids, think of your neighbor’s kids, or your sister’s kids—or if you don’t like kids, think about your sex partner—even if her last name is .jpeg.”

  This line got a laugh. It always did.

  “Think of someone you don’t want to see die, because that’s why we’re here, and we’re not quitting until midnight. After midnight, the weenies can go home to bed. If you still feel good, you can stay and keep going. Keep in mind we’ll start again at 0900 tomorrow no matter how you feel. When you get up, don’t bother eating breakfast. It will be waiting for you here. Just take a shower, pull on clothes and head for the office. I’ll be waiting.”

  They shut up after that. No one talked about going home. Midnight came and went. By three a.m., most had left, and I chased the rest out. I wanted them to be able to function in the morning. I didn’t need them burned out—not yet.

  After three days, I had my nerds herded into a corner. They had a solution, and it was a good one. The data had been checked out, and simulation programs had been written, tested and retested. I knew how much firepower I was going to need to smash those comets down to manageable size. By the time the comets reached Earth’s orbit, they’d be granules of ice like a fine mountain mist.

  The numbers were alarming. I took them to my office and summoned Miklos. When he arrived, he looked them over then shot me a shocked expression.

  “We can’t do this, sir,” he said.

  “We have to.”

  “There has to be another way.”

  “Sure,” I said, grumpy after days with little sleep. “We could just let the comets fall as they may. Let them extinguish all complex life on Earth. I’m sure a few microbes will survive to kick start the next era.”

  “But sir,” he said, looking back at the tablet I’d handed him. “This will take every missile we have—and every fissionable device we can build in the time remaining.”

  I nodded tiredly. “I figured as much. But those are the numbers. Now, I want you to draw up Fleet orders. We’ll have to take missiles off the cruisers and carriers. We’ll have to transport them to bases. My task force will fly to the Thor System without a single missile aboard.”

  “Why, sir? You should be back weeks before the Macros get within range.”

  “Because I don’t want any of them fired. When we face the macros, the fleet people are going to use the missiles if they have them aboard and they think their ship is going down. It’s only natural. We have to take that opportunity away from them.”

  Miklos frowned fiercely, but nodded. He began to work on the orders.

  “We should not be so far behind in our production,” he said, shaking his head. “How did we let ourselves get in this position? We could have had a bigger stockpile.”

  I took a deep breath before answering him and looked out my office window. It was so thick it could repel a fifty-caliber round—not that anyone on this island should want to kill me. I knew the glass was impregnated with nanites too, which would form a reactive armor against shattering. If a sniper did try to take me out, he’d have to have a custom-made gun, and he’d have to fire it fast, and he’d have to keep hitting the exact same spot while I stood still to penetrate that glass. If he screwed up any part of that formula, the nanites would rebuild the glass, uncracking it.

  I’d watched the windows being tested. The process was a strange one. Shattered glass became whole again, and it had felt like I was watching a slow-motion film in reverse.

  “We took Earth back from the Imperials only last year,” I said. “Remember? We had an entire world to organize and rebuild. We can blame ourselves now for not building up to face the Macros, but it won’t get us anywhere. Let’s just do it right this time. We won’t get another chance.”

  “Yes sir.”

  The next day, I took a transport up into space. I left Miklos behind, telling him he would have to look after Star Force in my absence.

  I took Jasmine with me as my exec. Thankfully, she didn’t argue when I gave her the assignment. She just kissed me hard and whispered: “At least we’ll be together, no matter what happens.”

  “We’ll drink a bottle when we win,” I said, giving her a firm,
confident smile that I didn’t feel at all.

  She shook her head, smiling. “I won’t be drinking with you.”

  For a second, I didn’t get it at first, then the light bulb went on. “Oh right, the kid. Okay, then…we’ll drink juice or something.”

  She laughed.

  -21-

  The flight out from Earth wasn’t like previous sorties into the blue. Star Force wasn’t heading into harm’s way to save some sorry aliens on another planet this time. We weren’t heading out to do battle in the traditional sense, either. Our mission was to exterminate an old enemy. To destroy their nests, villages, factories—whatever you want to call them—before they could do the same to us.

  It occurred to me, as I stood on the bridge of my flagship, that both the combatants might just kill one another off in this struggle.

  For the Macros, their factories were like their queen-mothers, they were the machines that gave birth to all the others. What if we did manage to find those factories and destroy them all? What if in turn they killed our planets and populations? We’d both die out after that, mortally wounded and unable to recover…

  I shook my head, squared my shoulders and harshly drove those thoughts from my mind. If I was sure of one thing, it was that the enemy wasn’t entertaining any sappy musings while staring at these same stars. They were coldly calculating their best moves in order to win. No deeper thoughts would ever cross their circuitry.

  While we left the Solar System, crossed the Alpha Centauri System and eventually reached Helios, I spent most of my time marshaling my forces. We had quite a fleet. The core of it consisted of fifteen carriers, fully loaded with over a hundred fighters each. Protecting them were several hundred battleships, cruisers and a host of smaller craft.

  We all glided through space together. Behind the main fleet were no less than forty transports—newer, armored and fast-moving ships. They weren’t like our old transports, which were knock-offs of Macro designs that had resembled cans of tennis balls. These newer ships were built to not only house troops but also to deploy them in battle. One of our more effective techniques included the launching of marines as small independent fighters. We had about thirty thousand marines: a mix of Centaurs and humans. For once, the humans outnumbered the Centaur troops ten to one. I found them easier to manage. The marines were both my ground forces and my last-ditch space force. If it came right down to it, I’d deploy them outside their ships to destroy the enemy in close quarters.