Skippy’s ego is massive enough already, it is good to take him down a peg once in a while. Anyway, he knows how awesome he is.
The last week, days and hours as we approached the edge of the damping field were filled with increasing tension. Everyone aboard was waiting for karma to bitchslap us, specifically me. Skippy didn’t make things easier on me. “Joe,” his avatar said as it appeared on my office desktop. “Only a few hours left now, huh?”
“Uh, yeah,” I answered warily. “You don’t sound entirely happy about it?”
“I have mixed feelings. I wish we weren’t leaving so soon.”
“This is a hell of a time to tell me, Skippy!”
“I know, I know,” he sounded genuinely chastened. His avatar took off the ridiculously oversized admiral’s hat and pretended to scratch its head before putting the hat back on. “I just can’t help it.”
“Please explain, why do you not want to get out here as soon as possible? No one has ever escaped from the Roach Motel before, I thought you would be proud of that.”
“I am proud of that, Joe, it is yet another example of my continued awesomeness. The reason I have mixed feelings is, well, I feel like we will be leaving behind a lot of unanswered questions. Coming here should have been an opportunity to get answers to who I am and what happened to me, and about what happened to Elder sites across the galaxy. I have more data, but I also have more questions than before we jumped in here!”
Crap, the last thing I needed, just as we were about to jump away from the most secure prison in the galaxy, was a reluctant AI controlling our ship. “Skippy, listen, you have all that new data. Maybe there’s some new information out there in the galaxy beyond this system that will help you makes sense of what you already know. And, hey, we can always come back here later, right?”
“No, we can’t, Joe. The Guardians are frantic now as we approach the edge of the damping field. Don’t worry, they aren’t going to stop us. But if we try to jump in again, they aren’t going to buy my line of bullshit a second time. We can’t come back here, and they are going to be much more thorough in the future about destroying any ships that do jump in. They are surprised and unhappy that a Maxolhx ship they thought was a derelict was able to power up and fly. As soon as we jump away, I suspect the Guardians will tear all the hulks in the junkyard into tiny pieces; they are not taking any more risks. Also, they are very likely to bombard the Thuranin on Gingerbread and wipe them out of existence.”
What I instinctively wanted to say was those Thuranin getting blasted from orbit was nothing but good for us, but I couldn’t. Despite everything I knew about those little green MFers, I felt sorry for the group stranded on Gingerbread. Sure, when they jumped into the Roach Motel, they had unquestionably been hateful fanatics seeking technology they could use to destroy their enemies. And everyone else in the galaxy. But Romeo and Juliet showed us some of those Thuranin were different, and I sort of regretted not bringing some of them aboard. Yes, it would have been impractical to allow Thuranin, even young, non-cyborg Thuranin onto our ship. For security, we would have had to keep them locked up, or at least restricted them to certain areas of the ship with bots following them everywhere. What kind of life was that? And if we dropped them off at Earth, they would be prisoners for the rest of their lives. No, I had to accept the Thuranin on Gingerbread could not offer us ay advantage in our struggle to survive, and if I simply wanted to rescue people, there were many deserving beings in the galaxy. “All right, so we can’t come back, that you know of. We’ve done a lot of stuff you thought was impossible, Skippy. Don’t give up now.”
He sighed. “You’re right, again. If you tell anyone I said that, I will deny the whole thing. This is one of a very few places in the galaxy known to have active Elder technology, and the Roach Motel is almost the easiest one for us to access. Can you promise me that if I ever do need to come back here, you will use that disorganized blob of mush in your skull dream up a way for us to survive jumping back in?”
“Since you put it so nicely, Skippy,” I rolled my eyes, “it’s a deal.”
We reached the edge of the damping field, or close enough because Skippy reported he might have been wrong and the Guardians could be getting ready to stop us. So we jumped before we were actually clear of the damping effect, but the field was weak enough that we only blew twelve drive coils. Fortunately, we had plenty of jump drive coils. Unfortunately, the ones that blew were the ones Skippy had selected as most reliable, considering they were ancient and we had salvaged them from a space junkyard.
Whatever.
We jumped away!
We escaped from the Roach Motel, something no ship had ever done.
Gunnery Sergeant Adams expressed the crews’ sentiment best when she said, “Monkeys kick ass.”
A second jump, after a thorough, painstaking inspection of every system aboard the ship, took us a distance Skippy considered to be safely away from the Guardians, and then we set course for the closest wormhole. We jumped slowly and carefully but steadily, and fired up the normal-space engines while the jump drive capacitors were charging. We had a lot of built-up velocity to kill, so we punched up three-quarters thrust whenever we could.
Our first priority was to learn what the hell had been going on in the galaxy while we were trapped in the Roach Motel. To do that, Skippy recommended we contact an old Kristang data relay station outside a star system controlled by the Black Trees clan, or it used to be controlled by the Black Trees. With the civil war we had started hopefully still raging, the Black Trees might be shattered into pieces. Or they could have made alliances and be even stronger. We didn’t know, and we needed to know.
The possibility that the civil war had quickly run its course while we were trapped in the Roach Motel, was the only dark cloud affecting the otherwise triumphant mood of the crew. Sure, our secondhand ship might fall apart at any moment, and we were starting to run low on our favorite foods, but Skippy was restored to full awesomeness and we had a functioning starship! We had been away for so long there was no way the Thuranin could still be hunting for us. I was hoping that, with all the problems the Thuranin had after getting thrashed by the Jeraptha, they had forgotten all about a mysterious ship.
Chapter Thirty One
“The Thuranin report there is still no sign of the mystery ship,” Illiath reported to her commander. She knew the Thuranin’s lack of success was not due to lack of effort; the client species had devoted substantial resources to finding the mystery ship that destroyed an Elder wormhole. Not only were the Thuranin angry at the loss of their warships in the incident and ashamed they had allowed the mystery ship to escape, they knew their patrons the Maxolhx were anxious for answers. Answers no one had.
The wormhole had taken months to reset, and it was still not entirely stable. Its schedule had been altered; the location and timing of its emergence points were different now, and the event horizon now flickered alarmingly as if it were about to collapse again at any moment. The Maxolhx had ordered Thuranin ships to go through the untrusted Elder wormhole, not wanting to risk their own ships. Alarmingly, the three wormholes closest to the disrupted one were also demonstrating strange behavior. Those three wormholes emerged at their long-scheduled locations, but occasionally the event horizons appeared late, or closed early. The situation was extremely alarming.
“Not even a debris field?” Komatsu asked, knowing the answer. The two Maxolhx officers floated in the information center of the battlecruiser Rexakan, held in place by suspensor fields controlled by the biological implants in their brains. Data flowed through the cranial links, allowing them to see images transmitted directly to their optical nerves and to hear sounds without crude vibrations traveling through the purified air. Despite the numerous advantages of controlling ship systems by mere thoughts, Komatsu sometimes preferred the tactile feel of a touchscreen. Especially when he was angry, and bashing a screen with his powerful claws provided a welcome relief for the frustrations he felt.
“No,” Komatsu declared, narrowing his eyes in a gesture intended to convey disgust with their client species. “They didn’t find anything, because there is nothing to find. That ship must have fired some sort of disruptor beam just before it jumped away.” The Maxolhx knew from reconstructed sensor data that there had been the distinctive gamma ray burst from a jump wormhole, just before the Elder wormhole essentially exploded. “They collapsed that wormhole to destroy the Thuranin ships parked in front of the event horizon, which meant there were no sensor platforms in the area to determine where they jumped to.”
“We have not yet detected a gamma ray burst from where they jumped to,” Illiath noted, cringing slightly in anticipation of her commander’s wrath at her questioning his conclusions.
“The speed of light is slow,” Komatsu said pensively, to her surprise. “That ship could have jumped very far away. They led the foolish Thuranin on a merry chase, making them believe the mystery ship was damaged and could not jump far.” He did not mention the Maxolhx themselves had been confident the mystery ship had a poor and deteriorating ability to jump, and would soon be trapped. “We will eventually detect where that ship jumped to, though by then that data will be of little use to us.”
“You still believe the mystery ship was Rindhalu technology?” Illiath asked carefully.
“That ship destroyed, seriously disrupted, an Elder wormhole that has been stable for millions of years. Either we believe the Rindhalu were responsible, or we must conclude another species possess technology our scientists cannot even imagine.” At the beginning of their now endless war against the Rindhalu, the Maxolhx had attempted to close wormholes that were strategically vital to their enemy. Nothing worked. Nuclear weapons detonated at the event horizon, or inside the wormhole, had no effect. The same with more powerful antimatter explosions. Desperate, the Maxolhx had even tried using Elder devices to disrupt the fabric of spacetime around a wormhole; that too had no effect. Not exactly no effect, because doing that provoked a Sentinel to awaken and devastate four Maxolhx star systems in addition to chasing down and crushing a powerful Maxolhx battle fleet. Since that incident millions of years ago, the Maxolhx had not found, or even theorized, a way to alter the operation of an Elder wormhole in any way. It was not possible. Yet, someone had done it. “If the Rindhalu disrupted that wormhole, our long-time rivals have acquired a technological advantage over us. That is serious, even catastrophic, but it has happened before and we will deal with it. If another species knows how to disrupt Elder technology, then we,” he smiled, baring his fangs, “are no longer one of the two apex species in this galaxy. We are second tier. We will be clients.”
“That is a very big problem.”
“It is.”
“What can we do about it? Our own forces have not detected any sign of the mystery ship,” Illiath said with disappointment, knowing she was being unfair, as the Maxolhx fleet only recently had any reason to care about something even the Thuranin had described as no more than a minor annoyance. Disrupting an Elder wormhole had turned the mystery ship from a minor annoyance into a major threat.
“Looking for that ship is a waste of resources,” Komatsu said almost to himself. “The galaxy, even this sector, is too big. There are too many places a ship can hide, and this ship must have advanced technology. No, we must first study the effect, not the cause.”
“Sir?” The subordinate officer asked, confused.
“The wormholes, Illiath. We know that before this wormhole,” he tapped the display with an extended claw, making a clicking sound, “was disrupted, several wormholes in this sector have been acting strangely. Opening and closing at unscheduled times, and our long-range sensor data suggests during those gaps in the schedule, the wormholes were opening in locations not on the schedule. It also appears that wormholes we thought to be dormant have reopened, but only temporarily. Someone,” he tapped the display forcefully, making the device groan and creak under his might, “has been manipulating, controlling, Elder wormholes. The disruption we saw might have been unplanned, perhaps an accident. Possibly that mystery ship attempted to manipulate that wormhole so it could escape, and something went wrong.”
“Some species has the capability to control an Elder wormhole?” Illiath gasped. Nearly destroying a wormhole was one level of technology. Controlling an Elder wormhole implied Elder-level technology.
“That is the most likely conclusion, is it not?”
Illiath could only nod silently, her mind reeling. An enemy who could control Elder wormholes could cut off access to Maxolhx star systems, trapping the Maxolhx powerlessly behind the great gulf between stars. Even the fast long-range ships of the Maxolhx fleet could not travel far across the star lanes without stopping for fuel and maintenance to their delicate jump drive machinery. “How do you propose we study this effect?”
“Where it started,” Komatsu tapped another dot on the display.
Illiath pulled up data about that wormhole thru her bioimplants. “The wormhole that leads to the home planet of the humans?” She asked, puzzled. “The humans certainly cannot control wormholes. When the Kristang landed there, humans were still using chemical rockets. They do not have star travel capability.”
“The humans are not of interest to me,” Komatsu waved a hand dismissively. “But the wormhole connecting near their homeworld was the first to display anomalous behavior. And that is of interest. That wormhole shut down, and has not reset or reopened that we know of. We need to know why.”
Chapter Thirty Two
The Flying Dutchman, still carrying too much velocity, zipped past a Kristang data relay at the edge of a star system controlled by the Black Trees clan. Our speed took us in and out of the relay’s effective range so quickly, Skippy had less than forty seconds to query the thing for the data we wanted. “Did you get the info we need?” I asked anxiously.
“Ok, Ok, Mmm hmm, interesting,” Skippy mumbled. “This is good, ooh this is good. That little spark we kindled on Kobamik has grown into a wildfire, Joe. Every Kristang clan and star system, every planet and asteroid outpost has been pulled into the war. The Thuranin have given up trying to contain the conflict, they are now hoping the war burns itself out quickly. That is unlikely to happen; I expect the war has at least two or three years of major fighting before it shakes out so the major clans begin making new power-sharing arrangements. Then, typically there is disorganized fighting flaring up for another three to five years before the political situation dies back down to the normal peacetime level of hostility.”
“Great, great,” I said impatiently, wanting him to get to the point instead of giving me a lesson in Kristang political science. “Is there a chance a Kristang clan would have any incentive to retrieve the White Wind clan leaders from Earth?”
“No. No way, dude. The White Wind clan and their assets have been split up and absorbed by three different clans. Effectively, the White Wind no longer exists. The Kristang are no threat to Earth, now or in the foreseeable future.”
“Outstanding!” I pumped a fist in the air, and Chotek offered me a high five. Yes, he looked awkward doing it but that made the gesture extra special. High fives went all around the bridge, CIC and out into the passageway. When the cheers died down, I asked the next question, the one I was dreading. The Kristang were no threat to Earth, but this would be a perfect opportunity for karma to get revenge against me. “Are there any external threats to Earth that you know about? We know you are not happy about monkeys having nukes, I mean threats from other species.”
“Not that I know of, Joe.”
I flashed a grin back to Chotek and was raising an arm to offer my boss a congratulatory handshake when Skippy interrupted me.
“Of course, if there were a threat by another species like the Thuranin, we wouldn’t find out about it from an obsolete Kristang data relay.”
“Crap.”
>
“Joe, I do not want to harsh your buzz. In my opinion, the Thuranin have no interest in Earth and right now they are so beat up by the Jeraptha, those little green MFers don’t have the time or resources to even think about sending a ship all the way to your backwater homeworld. I do not think we have to worry about them. And in case you think we may be having a communications glitch, let me say clearly that I do not know of, or anticipate, any external threat to Earth within the next, say, twenty years.”
“Oh thank God,” I let the profound relief wash over me. Twenty years. We could bring our Frankenship to Earth for a long stay and not rush about sending out another expedition. Cheeseburgers. When we got back to Earth, I would be feasting on cheeseburgers cooked on a backyard grill or over a campfire. Damn, I needed a vacation. A month, no, three solid months of leave time when I could be an anonymous Army sergeant, with no responsibilities. Someone else could worry about saving the world for a change. “All right, I know we need to stop by a gas giant planet to get fuel, pump up the tires and maybe buy an air freshener to hang off the mirror, but then we are going straight back to Earth.”
“Colonel, I believe a celebration is in order,” Chotek declared with a broad smile he had rarely demonstrated. No doubt he also was anticipating getting back to Earth, to adulation and the immense respect of his peers. Assuming his peers ignored the, you know, whole incident of Hans Chotek the career diplomat planning and sparking an alien civil war. That might make dinner party conversation awkward for him for a while. “If Major Simms has-”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 54
