“They knew we were coming,” I repeated uselessly, trying to wrap my head around that astonishing, unexplainable fact. “Focus,” I said to myself, not realizing at first I had spoken aloud. “Back to my original question: what do we do next? We jump, obviously, the question is where?”
Skippy answered immediately. “The closest two wormholes lead to Bosphuraq territory, but we can worry about that later. Those two wormholes are only fourteen degrees apart from here; my suggestion is we set course in between them to confuse the Thuranin. We can decide which wormhole to target in a couple days.”
“Good. Let’s do that.”
“Course is plotted in the jump navigation system,” Skippy said without his usual smugness.
I sat in the command chair, with absolutely nothing to do, watching the jump drive capacitor charge approach the minimum needed for a medium-distance jump. The capacitors already had sufficient energy to feed into the coils for a short emergency jump, but with an entire task force hunting us, possibly more than one task force, I didn’t want to waste precious energy on a jump that might only take us from the fire into the frying pan. If we were surrounded by enemy ships, a short jump would give us only a short reprieve from being caught in a damping field and trapped. Still, what would I do if enemy ships jumped in near us before we had enough charge for at least a medium jump? What could we do? “Hey Skippy,” I asked, “what about quantum resonators? We drop one behind us as we jump, throw off enemy sensors, so they can’t follow us.” Then I remembered what Skippy had told me about such devices. “Not follow us as easily, I mean.”
“Ordinarily that is standard practice in this situation,” he agreed, “but we don’t have any quantum resonators aboard.”
“What? We had, like, three, or a half dozen,” I hated looking stupid in front of my boss so I kept my eyes forward at the main display, to avoid meeting Chotek’s eyes.
“Correct. We had them, Joe. I was forced to use them to calibrate the jump drive coils you monkeys thoroughly screwed up.”
“How the- how could you use a resonator to-”
“Ugh. We do not have time for a physics lesson, Joe, and explaining anything to you is a waste of time anyway. I used the resonators to make a set of coils fully discoherent; that way I could strip them of their programing and reset them to function together. That is a very crude method that is not standard practice; it shortens the useful life of a coil and I had to junk one of every ten coils I ran through the process. I only did it because we are truly desperate. What matters is, we do not have any resonators left aboard the ship. Without my full powers of awesomeness, I can’t do any magic to conceal our jump path. Bottom line is, the Thuranin will be able to determine our jump path and pursue us.”
“That is a complication,” I caught Desai’s eye, and she frowned.
“Yes it is, Joe,” Skippy agreed unhappily. “We will need to forget some of our standard practices, because we’re now flying without many of the capabilities we have become used to. Major Desai,” he addressed our chief pilot, “this situation will require a conscious effort to think in terms of this ship’s restricted flight characteristics.”
“Yes, Mister Skippy,” she replied with a look at me. I could tell her mind was already racing through unlearning many of the tactics she and her fellow pilots had spent thousands of hours of training to make instinctive. That wouldn’t be easy, but somehow she would do it. Desai had warned me several times that she was not the best pilot aboard the Flying Dutchman, that if she had not been in jail with me on Paradise, she would never have qualified to be a Merry Pirate. Her argument was that other people aboard were better natural and instinctive pilots, more technically proficient and quicker to learn new tactics. That argument was probably true and certainly irrelevant. She was my chief pilot because she was an absolute iceberg under pressure; nothing took her focus away from flying. No matter what outrageously strange new reality was thrown at her, she took it in stride and did her job. I trusted her completely to know what to do in a crisis, it was a simple as that. Any of the other hotshot pilots aboard the ship could execute instructions and fly our still-massive star carrier through the eye of the needle; what I needed Desai at the controls for was knowing what to do; she could let someone else’s fingers guide the ship through the maneuver. “We have revised settings on the flight simulator, but we’re still learning how best to fly the ship under the new restrictions.”
“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” I said, the words sounding limp and useless as the empty platitudes they were. Motivational speaking was not one of my strengths. Ah, screw it anyway. Desai knew I had faith in her, nice happy words were unnecessary. “Skippy, can we-”
“Contact!” He interrupted. “Gamma ray burst! One ship, nope, no, two ships. One five lightminutes away, one seven. They’ve got us bracketed, there will likely be other ships jumping in soon.”
“Damn it,” I swore at the charge indicator. There was barely enough power for a medium jump. I wanted us to make a good, long jump to get us well clear of the star system, and we were still technically in the Oort cloud. A long jump, then a medium jump to throw off immediate pursuit, so we could take a breather and Skippy could work on properly maintaining the drive components. He had warned me the Thuranin were not going to allow us any respite, that their ships would pursue us relentlessly. I had been hoping he was being pessimistic about that. “Ok, Jump option, uh,” I scrolled through the list an armrest display.
“Joe,” Skippy chided me gently. “Remember SCM.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He meant the principles of Space Combat Maneuvers. Desai had taught me how to fly, and after I was able to fly a small dropship around the ship without crashing into anything, she had moved onto teaching me Basic Fighter Maneuvers. The principles of BFM developed on Earth didn’t really apply to flying advanced alien starships or airspace craft, but she had wanted me to understand the thinking behind fighter tactics. If I couldn’t internalize and master that mode of thinking, then no way could I grasp the intricacies of space combat. I had passed the course, after a whole lot of long hours and hard work. “Got it, Skippy. What you mean is, we’re not in immediate danger. Those ships are no more than seven lightminutes away, so the photons from the gamma ray burst when we jumped in here have already swept past their location. We detected their inbound jump, but they can’t see ours. So, we don’t need to jump just yet.”
“Correct, Joe,” he said like a mother proud that her child had not tripped over their own feet while playing soccer. “Our jump wormhole creates an intense initial burst of gamma rays that the enemy cannot see, because those gamma rays have already gone past their position. If they had better sensors, they might see gamma rays bouncing off stray hydrogen atoms out here, but I seriously doubt that, given the Thuranin level of technology. Our stealth field is active and fully effective, and the active sensor pulses from those ships are just beginning to sweep over us; pulse strength is as yet too weak for them to get an echo to detect us. Our inbound jump did create a local spacetime ripple the enemy will detect, once their ships are able to establish a datalink and compare sensor data. I estimate we have eight maybe ten minutes before they find us.”
“Right,” I recalled the bit about how a jump wormhole essentially tore a temporary hole in spacetime, and that hole leaked distinctive radiation for hours, even days after a jump. The radiation level faded rapidly; but not rapidly enough to protect us from being detected. “They probably have other ships that jumped in farther away from us, and those ships may be in position to see our gamma ray burst.”
“Also true, unfortunately. In fact, I just detected another enemy ship that jumped in eleven lightminutes away; this one is behind us. Hmmm, interesting.”
“What? Interesting like, oh shit we’re screwed, or like trivia?” Sometimes Skippy’s absent-minded brain wandered so far off topic, he couldn’t tell what was important to us. At the moment, I did not care about any nerdnik bullshit like a slight increase in the ratio of hydrogen
to helium atoms in the interstellar medium.
“Not trivia, but not quite ‘oh shit’. Not yet. That last ship I detected has the unique jump signature of a battlecruiser. Using such heavy combatants for a search is not standard Thuranin fleet tactics; a big battlewagon like that is too slow to pursue a star carrier. That tells me the Thuranin are throwing every ship they have available into the hunt. They are serious about catching us, Joe. That is very bad news.”
“It is bad news, Skippy. It’s also good news.”
“Huh? How do you figure that?”
“Because it tells me the Thuranin threw this op together quickly. However they knew we were coming here, they didn’t have a lot of time to plan a pursuit and bring in a proper force structure. I would love to know how they knew we were going to Bravo, but they haven’t been planning for months to trap us.”
“Oh. I had not thought of it that way, Joe, that is a good point. Wow, you are a freakin’ ray of sunshine on a rainy day.”
“Any light in the darkness is better than nothing, Skippy.”
“Unless the darkness is a tunnel and the light is a train coming at you.”
“Thank you for cheering us up, Skippy.” We waited six minutes while the capacitors built up a charge, then performed a not-quite-long jump. Better than a medium jump, not as far as I wanted. Then we settled down to recharge for another jump.
“Hey, Joe,” Skippy’s voice startled me, as I had been half asleep in my office. My left hand was cramped from holding my head up, and my left cheek was numb from pressing against my knuckles. Empty coffee cups were scattered across my desk; caffeine had long since stopped having any effect. Sleep. What I needed was sleep. We all needed sleep. Our jump drive needed its own kind of downtime, and that wasn’t going to happen either.
The Thuranin had been, as Skippy predicted, relentless in pursuit of us. At first, we had success in evading their picket lines, to the point where I began to breathe a sigh of relief and let the tension out of my shoulders. Maybe I had not quite been ready to pat myself on the back and offer congratulations to the crew for a successful escape, but I had been thinking about it.
Then reality smacked me in the face like a cold dead fish. I use that analogy because, after the initial pain of having a salmon battering my face faded, I would still be stuck with bruises and a lingering slimy smell. Ok, I suck at analogies, but you know what I mean.
Our initial success, I soon realized with crushing disappointment, was because the Thuranin task force had to spread out to cover all space around the Bravo system, making their coverage thin and spotty. Once they accumulated a half dozen data points from the gamma rays of our jumps, they knew roughly which direction we were going and could concentrate their substantial forces along the line between Bravo and the two closest wormholes. The Thuranin didn’t yet know which of the two wormholes into Bosphuraq territory we planned to take; because we hadn’t decided which one to aim for. They did know our options were limited and grew more limited with every jump. Our jump drive was wearing out from repeated use without breaks to recalibrate the coils. This was a problem not only because our coils were becoming weaker and discoherent, reducing the distance we could jump on a charge, it also meant the magic tricks Skippy performed to mask the Flying Dutchman’s jump signature were wearing off. Eventually, the masking would burn off completely and the Thuranin would be able to positively identify the Dutchman as the star carrier that disappeared near Paradise. Worse, they would be able to analyze how our true jump signature had been masked, and we would not be able to conceal our signature in the future.
We had been jumping continuously until ship and crew were exhausted. There was a nightmarish period of two days when we had to jump every thirty three minutes, because that is how long it took a pair of Thuranin cruisers to find us after every jump. We finally managed to shake those two ships, and now we had the luxury of almost two hours between jumps. That had made me briefly happy, until Skippy told me he thought the Thuranin had simply changed tactics. Rather than us cleverly slipping away from the annoying pair of cruisers, those ships had been pulled away for maintenance. The Thuranin now knew we were headed toward one or the other of two wormholes; they didn’t need to chase us across the empty wasteland of interstellar space. All they needed to do was use their massive, well-rested star carriers to leapfrog dozens of warships ahead of us and block our path. By the time we got to whichever of the two wormholes we decided to attempt going through, the area would be saturated with frigates casting overlapping sensor nets, and cruisers and destroyers poised to home in on our location and trap us in powerful damping fields. The Thuranin commander had wisely pulled task force ships offline for a maintenance cycle until we got closer to a wormhole, then the well-rested ships and crew would hunt us down and capture or destroy us.
The worst part of our dilemma was the nagging feeling I had that no matter what we did, the Thuranin would trap us, and we would have to self-destruct the ship. Those little green MFers had somehow known we were going to Bravo. They either had a way to track our ship across great distances, or they had a way to predict our next move. Maybe they even had a way to see into the future, despite Skippy’s dismissal of that idea when I told him about it. Skippy was an awesomely, amazingly advanced being, but I had learned through painful experience he was not infallible, and he didn’t know everything. Perhaps the Maxolhx did have at least a limited ability to see into the future, and they were helping their clients the Thuranin hunt down and kill a pesky stolen star carrier? I could not think of any other way the Thuranin could have known we were on our way to Bravo.
And if the Maxolhx knew about us, maybe they also knew our ship was filled with humans. In that case, the powerful Maxolhx might be sending a ship to destroy our home planet.
In which case, my leadership failure had not only doomed my ship, but my entire species.
That depressing thought was weighing on my mind when I pulled myself upright in the chair, rubbed my tired eyes and answered the beer can. “Hey, Skip. What’s up?”
“Skip? You’re too tired to say my full name?” He chuckled.
“Yeah.”
“Oh, sorry. You are tired. Ah, the whole crew is tired. Anywho, I have a bit of good news. I think it’s good news. Actually, it’s not my good news, it-”
I was too tired for his usual winding path toward getting to the point. “What is it?”
“I was talking with Sergeant Adams, and she, well, she’s on her way to your office right now. I’ll let her tell you the good news.”
Adams looked as tired as I felt, but she wasn’t letting exhaustion keep her from duty. “Sir, I think,” she paused to stifle a yawn, “I know how the Thuranin knew we were coming to Bravo.”
Based on the way she cocked her head, I had not been able to hide the disappointment from my tired face. “This isn’t,” I couldn’t help yawning, “something about time travel or seeing into the future? Skippy already shot down those ideas.”
“No magic involved, Sir,” she looked pointedly at my fresh cup of coffee, so I took a healthy gulp while she waited.
“Ok,” my tongue wasn’t working properly because I’d taken too big a mouthful of hot coffee. “Tell me how you figured out the secret. Skippy sounds impressed.”
Margaret Adams gave the avatar a look that was part disgust and part affection. “Skippy is impressed when monkeys can tie shoes; we don’t need his approval. It started with me asking Skippy how many of these conduit things are known in this part of the galaxy. No, not just conduits, conduits that are the same as the one on Barsoom.”
“Holy shit,” my hand went limp and the coffee cup dropped and bounced off the desk as realization dawned on me. “Adams, you are a freakin’ genius. Goddamn! That is so simple, why didn’t I see that?”
“Because you are a dumdum, Joe?” Skippy teased.
“Hey, beer can, you didn’t think of it either.” I retorted. “Go ahead, Adams, sorry for interrupting you.”
“No pro
blem, Sir. Skippy told me the Elder installation on Bravo is the same type of conduit or whatever as the one on Barsoom. My guess is the Thuranin arrived at Barsoom shortly after we left. They knew someone had raided Barsoom and caused a lot of havoc to steal what they thought was a worthless Elder artifact. So, the Thuranin asked themselves whether there are other Elder artifacts of that type, and they knew the closest one is at Bravo. Skippy told me that’s not correct, there is another one closer, but that one was removed from its original site and is now at a heavily guarded Thuranin military base.”
“That’s why I didn’t bother listing it as a potential target, Joe,” Skippy added.
“Crap,” I said sourly. “So, on the chance that whoever raided Barsoom was looking for more conduits, the Thuranin set a trap at Bravo?”
“Exactly, Joe,” Skippy’s voice was inappropriately bubbling with happiness. A puzzle had been solved, and that’s what he cared about. The fact that we were still running for our lives was forgotten for the moment. “The Thuranin clearly got to Bravo before we did. They could take the direct route through that heavily-trafficked wormhole we had to avoid, remember? I’ll bet by the time we arrived at Bravo, the Thuranin had taken away the real conduit and replaced it with a fake, to make sure we didn’t get the thing.”
“Well, shit,” I sat back in my chair and mopped up spilled coffee with a napkin. “We are seriously screwed, then.”
“Damn it, Joe, I thought you would be happy to hear this news. It means the Thuranin do not have some freakin’ magical way to track us across interstellar space. All they did was look at the data and put two and two together.”
“I am happy the Thuranin probably can’t track us. The reason I am not happy is that now the Thuranin, and the entire Maxolhx coalition know for certain there is a mystery ship flying around looking for conduits! They’re going to lock up every Goddamn conduit they know about, and now we’ll never find one to fix you.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 12
