“Uh,” I stalled for time, because I did not have a more practical idea. Or any idea at all. “Hey! How about this: now that your full awesomeness is back, can you send a signal to the Guardians through another dimension, tell them to turn off the damping field near us?”
“No,” Skippy replied in a voice that implied he could not believe I had asked such a stupid question. “The damping field is a grid covering the entire star system; it is either on or off. If the field is off, then that Maxolhx ship can jump away and we would never catch it. Actually, hmm. It’s worse than that. Deactivating the field would cause the damping effect to degrade from the outer edge first. Since the ship we are pursuing is closer to the edge than we are, it would be able to jump significantly before we could.”
“Scratch that idea,” I said hastily. “We can’t allow the enemy to jump away at all.”
“Well, the field is created by generator stations which surround this system like a bubble. I suppose, theoretically, that if selected generator stations were disabled, the field would be weakened in a local area. That could allow us to jump, while preventing the enemy from jumping. Except the enemy would eventually detect the change in damping field coverage, and change course so they enter one of the weakened areas before us.”
“Not if we hit them hard enough first,” I was excited by that idea. “Hey, could the damping field be weakened behind us, closer to the star? If we could do that, the enemy would have farther to travel to get to a place they could jump from.”
“As I am not familiar with this damping field system, any attempt to weaken it in a localized area would be a matter of trial and error, until I gathered enough data to make accurate predictions.”
“That’s Ok, Skippy, I understand. You can start by, like, taking one generator offline. Do that, see what it does to the damping field, then-”
“Whoa, whoa there, Joe. No can do.”
“Skippy, I know we don’t have a lot of time, and uh, the damping field effect probably acts at lightspeed, right? So after knocking out one generator, it would take hours for the effect to reach us. I’m willing to take that risk, actually, that gives us time to plan how to attack-”
“Joe! Jeez Louise will you calm down before you blow a circuit? I did tell you all this is theoretical.”
“Oh. Crap. Yeah, you did, I thought you were just using an expression.”
“No I was not. Theoretically, a damping field can be weakened in a localized area. However, in this case discussing how to alter the damping field is a purely academic exercise. I can’t do it, Joe. If I attempted to order damping field generators taken offline, the Guardians would never accept that instruction from me. Listen, I haven’t bothered your overworked monkey brain with the details, but the Guardians have become increasingly agitated as the Dutchman and now an enemy ship have begun maneuvering in this system. As soon as the enemy set course for the edge of the damping field, the Guardians wanted to obliterate it.”
“Oh, hell, Skippy!” I threw my hands up in disgust. “Let them do it! That would save us the trouble of trying to kill that ship.”
“Gosh, Joe, my tiny little brain never considered a brilliant idea like that,” his voice dripped with sarcasm. “Duh. I did think of that, you moron. There is only one teensy weensy problem with that idea. I can’t actually give orders to the Guardians. They have very strict instructions from their original programmers, and I can’t alter those instructions. All I have been able to do is identify us as also being of Elder origin. Once the Guardians accepted me as a fellow Elder construct, they temporarily set aside their instructions in order to avoid causing harm to an authorized Elder activity in this system. Unfortunately, I have no way to tell the Guardians that the Flying Dutchman is authorized and the Maxolhx ship is not.”
“Crap. It’s all or nothing, then? If you release the Guardians, they will destroy the Maxolhx ship, but they will destroy us also?”
“Correct, Joe,” Skippy stated sadly. “Hence why I did not mention that possible course of action.”
“You should have, Skippy. We need to know all our options.”
“Sudden, violent death is not what I call ‘an option’, Joe.”
“It is, Skippy,” I looked across the table and caught Chang’s eye. “You’ve been following this fruitless conversation?”
“Yes, Sir,” he looked grim. “We need to bring this option to Mr. Chotek.”
“Option? What option?” Skippy sputtered.
“Skippy, we must prevent the Maxolhx from taking our secret to the galaxy outside this system. If the only way to accomplish that mission is to sacrifice this ship and crew, then that’s what we do. I don’t like it either, but you do understand, right?”
“Yes,” he said in a low, disgusted voice. “Ugh. That is the last time I tell you about a possible course of action that leads to certain death for us. Crap! I just finished gluing together this ugly shitbox of a starship, and now you’re going to let someone blow it up?”
“That is not my first choice, Skippy. We may have to do it, unless you can think of a better idea?”
“If I had a better idea, I would have told you already,” he left the ‘duh’ unspoken, but we all knew what he meant.
I looked at Chang. “I’ll brief Chotek when I meet with him today at 1600.”
“Wait, Joe!” Skippy pleaded. “Before you do something fatal to us, promise me something.”
“What?”
“That you will do your best to dream up an incredibly stupid, impractical, idiotic monkey-brain idea to pull our asses out of this fire.”
“I thought you hated when a monkey thinks up an idea when you couldn’t.”
“I do hate it. It is humiliating beyond belief. However, in this case, I will gladly embrace utter humiliation if it means we survive.”
“Utter humiliation, huh?” I winked to Chang, who grinned. “If we monkeys think of a way out of this, will you stop singing showtunes?”
“Ha! No way, Jose. The crew loves my musical stylings. It would be a crime to deprive them of my awesome talent.”
“Yeah, that was my thought, too,” I held up my hands to Major Simms across the and silently mouthed ‘I tried’.
The French team was in charge of the galley the next day, which is why we were served a small salad with our scrambled eggs for breakfast. As my shift on the bridge took up the middle of the day, I missed lunch, settling for a sandwich. Lunch was probably delicious, but with our failing chase of the Maxolhx ship, the mood aboard the Dutchman was funereal and I didn’t have much taste for food. To cheer people up, we had a special meal that night; the main selection was lobster and filet mignon. It was lazy man’s lobster; out of the shell, sliced up and then reassembled in a claw and tail shape. Butter sauce on one side, and a sort of blueberry compote thing on the other. The blueberry stuff had flowed over and stained part of the lobster blue. “Blue lobster?” Simms whispered to me as she picked up her dinner.
“I think it’s Smurf and Turf,” I whispered back, and she laughed so hard she almost dropped her tray on the floor. Getting Simms to laugh cheered me up more than the special dinner did, and I was able to appreciate the French team’s efforts. For dessert we had several options, I chose a small cannoli. Adams also had a cannoli and sat across the table from me.
Eating a cannoli is kind of like eating an Oreo, there are many ways to do it. I simply crunched into my cannoli from one end. Adams used a spoon to dig out the filling, then stuck a straw in one end and sucked on it to get more of the filling out. I stared at her.
“What?” She asked defensively. “I like the inside part best.”
“Are you one of those people who takes an Oreo apart, eats the cream filling, then stick the two cookies together?” I asked with a grin.
She pursed her lips. “I never liked Oreos, give me a chocolate chip cookie any day.” Maybe I made her uncomfortable about her eating habits, because she set the empty cannoli on her plate. She tapped the empty pastry tube with the st
raw, then picked it up and held it to one eye, looking at me like it was a telescope. “Now I can eat the shell, and it’s crunchy without being all mushy in the middle.”
“Yeah, because it’s hollow, like-”
An empty cannoli is a hollow tube. A round hole on each end.
I dropped my half-eaten cannoli on my plate; it hit the end of my fork, flipping it up and onto the floor.
“Sir?” I realized Adams had been talking to me. “You all right, Colonel?”
“Huh? Yeah, uh,” I stood up abruptly, reaching out for the remaining half of the cannoli and picking up a napkin instead, a fact I didn’t catch onto until I was out the door into the corridor and I wondered why I was carrying a napkin. Embarrassed, I tucked it into a pocket, then placed it on the desk when I got to my office. “Hey, Skippy.”
“Ok, give me a second, Joe. Oh, haha. Hee hee hee! Damn, that is funny.”
“What?”
“I just binged-watched the TV show ‘Frasier’, Joe.”
“Just now? In like, one second?”
“Uh huh, yeah. I stretched it out because I wanted to savor it, why?”
“You and I have different ideas of what ‘binging’ means. Anyway, you liked it?”
“Yes I did. I binge-watched ‘Cheers’ last night and ‘Frasier’ is a spin-off so I gave it a try. That Frasier is funny. He is such a snobby, arrogant pompous ass, and he thinks he is so smart; I love seeing him be humiliated.”
“An arrogant pompous ass, who gets humiliated by people he thinks are not as smart as him? You, uh, don’t think that reminds you of someone?”
“Not that I can think of, why?” Skippy was happily clueless.
“No reason,” I rolled my eyes so hard I almost sprained something.
“I’ll tell you what, though. Frasier considers himself to be such an expert connoisseur of high culture, but he thinks the Karajan version of the opera ‘Turandot’ is definitive, while clearly anyone with half a brain can see that-”
“I will take you word about that, Skippy.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“I hear you.”
“Joe, I heard you in the galley. Smurf ‘n’ Turf, that was funny”, he chuckled.
“Glad you enjoyed it. I have a question.”
“Oh boy. Is this about the crazy idea you just thought up?”
“How did you know that?” Sometimes I was convinced he could read my mind.
“I did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. You left half a cannoli on your plate, and you walked away in the middle of a conversation with Sergeant Adams. Also, you’ve got that distracted moonpie look on your stupid face.”
“I do not look like a moonpie, Skippy.”
“I have video.”
“Let’s change the subject,” I said quickly. If he had video of me with a stupid moonpie look on my face, I didn’t want to know what other videos he had stored in his evil memory. “I have not one, but multiple ideas, and I’ll tell them to you in order of increasing craziness, Ok?”
“Ugh. If you think these ideas are crazy, I can only imagine how stupid they must be. Fine. I will listen, and shoot down your ideas one by one.”
“Deal,” I said quickly before he could change his mind. “We need to stop that Maxolhx ship. We can’t shoot at it from here, because our maser beam would dissipate over that distance, and the Maxolhx would have moved out of the way by the time the maser bolt got there.” It was still weird to think of a maser beam as a thing; like a long, thin spear. Our main cannons created a maser beam that was very roughly a quarter-mile in length because that is how fast light traveled between when the maser exciters started pulsing until they blinked off to recharge for the next shot. So, when we fired, our main cannon fired a beam a quarter-mile long and about fifty millimeters in diameter. That bolt of coherent, tightly-packed high-energy photons flew through space at the speed of light, which was incredibly slow for space combat. The bolt had no guidance system and could not be steered, and by the time it reached its original target point in space, the enemy ship had almost certainly moved out of the way. A battlegroup with multiple heavy ships had enough maser cannons that a target area could be saturated, but even then most of the time an entire battlegroup completely missed a target at long-range; because space is incomprehensibly vast and target ships have plenty of room to maneuver.
“Correct, Joe, it would be a complete waste of time and energy for us to shoot at the Maxolhx from this distance. The Maxolhx have much better weapons and sensors, and even they haven’t bothered to shoot at us.”
I thought back to my last shift on the bridge. Skippy had programmed random evasive patterns into the navigation system to avoid providing the Maxolhx with a predictable target; all our pilots needed to do was engage various options in the autopilot. “You are, uh, sure of that, right? They haven’t shot at us?”
“Joe, considering how banged up our sensors are, if the Maxolhx fired a maser beam at us and missed by more than two thousand kilometers, there is no way we would ever know a bolt flew right by us.” Skippy had explained that passing maser bolts could be detected by the backscatter of the beam impacting stray hydrogen atoms of the solar wind. “We have not detected any maser or other directed-energy fire incoming. I cannot guarantee the Maxolhx have not fired a volley of sophisticated hypervelocity missiles at us. Their technology is so far beyond the Flying Dutchman that we might not detect a cloud of missiles coasting at us until it was too late. When they got close enough, they would fire their engines up again and race in faster than our point-defense systems could probably react.”
“You are a fountain of good news today there, Skippy,” I complained, knowing I was being unfair to him.
“I report the facts, Joe. You decide whether to be depressed about it or not.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.”
“My awesomeness has improved our stealth field beyond the capability of the Thuranin, so even Maxolhx missiles may have difficulty getting a target lock on the Flying Dutchman if they are flying toward us at high speed. After missing us, they would need to brake to zero relative velocity, then accelerate to match us, and search with active sensors to pinpoint our location. That for sure has not happened, therefore I conclude the Maxolhx have not bothered to launch missiles at us. They may not have any missiles, or they may be saving them for a greater threat. Most likely, they got a good look at this stapled-together piece of crap we’re flying and determined that we are no threat at all to them. If I was commanding that Maxolhx ship, my one and only priority would be to get to the edge of the damping field before the Guardians change their mind. Joe, those Maxolhx have got to be peeing in their pants, worrying that at any second, the Guardians will reactivate and squash their ship like an overripe tomato.”
“Now that is a heart-warming image, Skippy. I’d love to see those smug kitties get crushed by the Guardians. Except we would get crushed first if the Guardians decided to act, huh?”
“Most likely, yes.”
“All rightee, then. For my least crazy idea, how about this: can you create a microwormhole, and we load one end of it into a missile. We launch the missile at the Maxolhx and when it gets close enough, we shoot a maser through the wormhole?”
“Uh, that would be a no, Joe. Soon as those rotten kitties detected our targeting scans, they would alter course radically, and our maser would be firing on empty space. This is not the shoot-look-shoot scenario we used with the giant maser projectors on Paradise. This is shoot or look. One is useless without the other. Unless we got super-mega-ultra lucky with a shot, and I wouldn’t count on that. You used up your lifetime supply of luck getting your boots tied correctly this morning.”
I bit back a reply, because I had somehow managed to lace one boot to the other that morning. That’s what happens when you are concentrating on thinking up a way out of an impossible situation rather than what your fingers are trying to do.
Before I could answer, he continued. “The whole shoot
or look question is moot anyway, Joe. No way could our crappy missiles get close enough to do anything useful. The Maxolhx would certainly detect and destroy our missiles as soon as I used a sensor pulse for targeting; much too far away for our maser to do any good.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
“OMG,” Skippy gasped in exasperation. “Then why did you just waste the last week of my freakin’ life asking me stupid questions?”
“It wasn’t a week, Skippy, more like two minutes.”
“Three minutes in meatsack time, Joe. Nine days in magical Skippy time. Damn! While you were blah, blah, blahing on and on I kept having to set a reminder to check back to see if you had finally gotten to the freakin’ point. It was like sitting though endless performances of ‘Waiting for Godot’ back to back, and Godot never shows up.”
“Who’s Godot?”
“Who is- Oh, this is hopeless, totally hopeless. Joe, you are completely, shamefully ignorant of human culture. Think of it as ‘Waiting In Line at the Department of Motor Vehicles’.”
“Oh, man, I get it now. Waiting for something that never happens.”
“Exactly.”
“You know what is the worst thing about standing in line at the DMV? When you lose at Clerk Roulette.”
“Roulette?” His voice expressed surprise. “I was not aware gambling was allowed at DMV facilities. Although, people spend a lot of time there with nothing to do, so-”
“No, Skippy. It’s not an official thing. It’s like, you’re waiting in line and there are three clerks behind the counter. A sweaty fat guy, a lady who looks like she last enjoyed life when Truman was president, and a cute girl with a great smile. You’re inching forward in the line, hoping you get the cute girl. The guy in front of you gets to the head of the line, and the sweaty fat guy calls him, so you’re thinking, score, right? You’ve got fifty-fifty odds now, and the guy at the cute girl’s counter is just finishing up. Plus, the grouchy lady has a customer with some problem that is going to take freakin’ forever because he doesn’t have ID or filled out the wrong form or something like that. The cute girl looks up at you and smiles because she assumes you will be her next customer. Just as you’re lifting a foot to step forward, the asshole at the cute girl’s counter decides to stay there and chat her up for a while, and the grouchy lady sends her customer away to find his ID. So you’re stuck with the Wicked Witch of the DMV and she knows you were praying not to get stuck with her, so she is going to make your life miserable. Sure enough, she finds some bitchy reason to send you to the back of the line. By the time you get to the head of the line again, the cute girl is on break, and you’re pissed off because you’re sure she’s out banging the jerk who was chatting her up. This time, you get the fat guy and you realize the reason he’s sweating is he has the flu, and he sneezes all over you. At about that time, you are hating life and thinking it would just be easier to give up driving and walk everywhere. Really, the DMV should merge with a funeral home, because people die of old age waiting in line there. At least if the DMV hosted funerals, you could shuffle past the casket and pay your respects while you’re waiting.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 49
