The Dead Sun (Star Force Series) by B. V. Larson Read Free Book Online Page B

fun I had at work.
    Now that I’d left Earth far behind, I felt free. We were flying a small task force out to the frontier to do something crazy—all of Marvin’s ideas are crazy. I had to ask myself why I’d approved this particular one so impulsively, and I think it had to do with the fact that it gave me the perfect excuse to leave Earth.
    “It’s strange, really,” I told Jasmine over breakfast. “I’m really liking this trip. It feels good to get away from Earth.”
    “What’s strange about that?” she asked.
    “Remember last year as we flew toward Earth? We were excited about that. We hadn’t seen home for years. These days, I’m fed up with it.”
    She shrugged. “I don’t see any of this as strange. You’ve never been comfortable on Crow’s throne.”
    “Don’t call it that.”
    We both fell silent and chewed our food for a moment. We were cruising toward the ring that would transport us from Alpha Centauri to Helios, the star system of our allies, the Worms.
    “It’s not a throne,” I said at last, putting down my fork with a clattering sound that was louder than I’d meant it to be. “Look at this system we’re crossing now. There’s nothing much out here. And in the next one, Helios, we don’t rule it. What kind of empire rules a single planet and a few colonies?”
    “It doesn’t matter what we call it,” she said.
    “Yes it does. If we’re going to have elections soon, we can’t go around calling our government an empire.”
    Jasmine frowned at her plate. I knew she didn’t believe in a world-wide, multi-planet democracy. I couldn’t blame her entirely—it might not work. But I did feel we owed it to our species to give it a try. Call me sentimental, but I liked individual freedoms, political equality and rules like one-man, one-vote.
    My girlfriend, on the other hand, thought it was too dangerous to hand political power over to whomever the people voted into the job. She felt there were too many vicious aliens around who might tear us a new one any given year, and we couldn’t afford to trust a haphazard political process that might give us a loser leader and result in our extinction.
    “People always trade freedom for security when they’re threatened,” I said, countering her unspoken argument. She didn’t even look at me as I spoke.
    “Right now,” I continued, “they like me because they see me as a strongman ruler, a protector. But that will change, you watch. They’ll turn on me if we have too many years of peace. They’ll hate me in a decade—maybe less.”
    “You’re right,” she said, staring at her plate. “You’re always right.”
    “No,” I said, chuckling. “I’m not. That’s the whole point. Don’t you think that everyone in history who’s been in a position of power like I am right now must have held that same conceited belief? I’m not always right. I can be replaced—and I should be, if I screw up.”
    “Let’s talk about something else.”
    I sighed and finished my food.
    “Hey,” I said, as nanite arms removed our plates and stuffed them into the walls for recycling. “Let’s go for a walk.”
    She frowned. “A walk? This ship isn’t that big.”
    “A walk on the outside,” I said, grinning.
    Jasmine was a bit nervous about the idea, but I finally talked her into a vac suit and a stroll on the outer hull. She said something about radiation and exposure, but I coaxed her out anyway. She wasn’t usually so fussy about things like that.
    Once out there, we watched space drift by as we sailed toward the ring. We couldn’t see the ring itself as we approached it, of course. We were going too fast for that. I especially enjoyed the sensation of going through a ring while out on the surface of a ship’s metal skin. It was unlike anything else in my experience. One second, you were in a given star system, and the next you were somewhere else—a hundred trillion miles away.
    “Isn’t it great out here?” I asked her, loving