Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “Aye aye,” Reed acknowledged, not waiting for me to confirm the order. “Ship’s handling like a pig,” she complained.

  “A bank of thrusters were torn out,” Skippy snapped. “What did you expect?”

  That got me mad. “Skippy! It’s not Reed’s fault, it’s my fault. Focus your anger at me, or better yet, focus on fixing what you can.”

  “Working on it, you knucklehead,” he grunted, and he wasn’t being his usual smart-ass self. He was scared.

  “All right then. Sitrep. Just the highlights.”

  “Ok,” he sighed. “The good news is, we don’t have to worry about the three remaining escort ships. The last patrol cruiser is heavily damaged and out of the fight, that ship’s captain has requested permission to abandon ship. They have a runaway reactor and unless they can shut it down soon, they-”

  Something flared on the display.

  “Ignore what I just said,” Skippy said without any satisfaction. “Scratch one patrol cruiser. That leaves two destroyers, both damaged. One is out of missiles, the other has only three missiles left. The task force commander has ordered them to pull back and separate. They are to observe, feed sensor data back to the heavy cruisers, and keep their damping fields energized so we can’t jump away.”

  “Finally, a bit of good news,” I wanted to give a hopeful thumbs up, but my thumb wasn’t feeling it.

  “That is not good news, Joe,” Skippy corrected me. “The task force commander is pulling back the escorts because they are not needed. Those heavy cruisers are catching us, we will be in effective range of their cannons within forty-seven minutes. Before you ask, I am doing all I can to increase the power flow to our engines, and their efficiency. Without shutting them down for major work, there isn’t much more we can get out of them.”

  “Understood,” I resisted the urge to zoom the display in to examine damage to our ship. The crew could do that on their own consoles. They didn’t need to see their captain obsessing over details, especially when I couldn’t do anything about it.

  What the hell could I do? We were out of options. Maybe if we-

  “Joe,” Skippy whispered in my earpiece. “I don’t see a way out of this. Even with the damage we’ve sustained, we could take on two of those heavy cruisers. We can’t survive a fight against six of them.”

  The crew would hear if I whispered, or they would see my lips moving. That would tell them I was having a private conversation with Skippy, a conversation I didn’t want them hearing. And that would be terrible for morale. Not that morale mattered much at that point. On the keypad of my own console, I typed Dump stuff overboard to make the ship less heavy?

  “That won’t make enough of a difference, Joe. Without cutting away part of the ship, which is not practical in the time we have, dumping all our dropships and anything else, will only buy us another three minutes.”

  “Shit,” I said aloud as I thumped the armrest. “What if”-

  Simms interrupted my thought. “Three heavy cruisers are breaking off the attack! They’re, running away?” She phrased the last words partly as a question. “We haven’t hit them that hard.”

  “No,” I bit my lip. For once, I was instinctively thinking in terms of space combat maneuvers. I knew what those ships were doing, and it meant trouble for us. “They’re not running. They’re racing to the back edge of our damping field. When they can jump, they will emerge ahead of us.” That was smart tactics by the kitties. They did not know exactly how badly we were damaged from the destroyer’s suicidal attempt to ram us. They did know that, with Valkyrie now mostly flying in a straight line rather than twisting and turning through the battlespace, we might be able to outrun their comparatively slow heavy cruisers. By jumping three heavy ships ahead of us, they could erase our potential speed advantage. And they could trap us between a hammer and anvil.

  The only way to stop those ships from getting to the edge of our damping field was to turn and close the distance, which was the last thing we wanted to do. No, that wouldn’t work anyway. The enemy commander could order the formation to disperse, and our damping field couldn’t cover them all.

  Everyone on the bridge turned to look at me. A good captain would have stared at the main display with quiet, stoic confidence. I plopped my elbows on the armrests and cradled my head in my hands, covering my ears to block out distracting sounds while I thought. Or maybe I was just hiding the shame that burned on my face, unable to face the crew who I was about to get killed because of my foolishness. UNEF was right, I am an impulsive idiot. We were out of options, no amount of silence would give me a brilliant idea, because there were no ideas that could-

  Silence.

  Holy shit.

  “Skippy,” I sat up straight and spoke aloud, not caring who heard me. “My father has a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.”

  “Uh, yessss,” his voice had the tone commonly used when talking to people who have clearly lost their minds. “He calls them ‘wife-cancelling’ headphones, although I suggested that he not tell your mother about-”

  “Yeah, great, good advice. Those headphones work by listening to the soundwaves in the air, and playing a wave that is the opposite frequency or, uh, amplitude or something.” I was a little vague on the subject.

  “Again, yes. Joe, I understand you must be in shock, but spouting random facts you read on Wikipedia is not going to help us get out of this mess.”

  He was not the only one aboard Valkyrie who thought I might have lost it. Several of the crew were looking at me, their eyes wide, mouths open to say something. Simms held up a hand to stall them, in a gesture that said ‘This is actually pretty normal’. The subtext of her gesture was ‘This is why my life sucks’.

  I agreed with her. “That is not a random fact,” I explained. “Damping fields work by creating vibrations in the fabric of spacetime, right? Those ripples prevent us from forming a stable jump wormhole.”

  “Ok, you didn’t get that from Wikipedia, and you are correct, but what-”

  “It is possible to use our damping field to play back the opposite type of vibration? Cancel the damping effect?”

  “Holy sh- No. No, it is not possible, dumdum. Those vibrations are way too chaotic to predict. By the time the ship detected incoming vibrations and retuned our own field, the vibrations would have changed in a random manner. Jeez, don’t you think the Maxolhx would already have that technology, if it were possible?”

  “Crap.” Now I not only looked like a fool who would get the entire crew killed, I was an idiot. Great move, I told myself. Next time, I should keep my mouth shut.

  “What about you?” Simms asked, startling me.

  “Me?” Skippy asked. “What about me?”

  “You keep blah blah blah-ing about how magnificent you are,” Simms flipped a middle finger at his avatar. “You’re telling me you can’t even predict how a freakin’ wave will change as it travels across spacetime?”

  “Hey!” Skippy hated it when anyone other than me criticized him. “It’s not my fault. Space is not the problem, it’s time that is the issue. The waves travel faster than the speed of light, but our sensors work at lightspeed. By the time the waves tripped across our sensor field, they are already too close for me to adjust our own field to compensate and-”

  “So?” Reed turned in her seat. “Stick a microwormhole out there and get sensor data with no time lag.”

  “Um,” Skippy sputtered.

  “Will that work?” I dared to hope. “A series of microwormholes, so you can analyze how the vibrations change as they move toward us?”

  “Jeez, I guess we could try it? Damn, why are all the ideas you monkeys dream up so obvious?”

  Simms wasn’t letting him off the hook. “Why is your vast intelligence unable to see ideas that are so obvious?”

  “Hey, you forget that I’m the one who has to actually do all this crazy shit,” he complained.

  “Yes,” I restrained an impulse to flip him off. “You are terribly unapprec
iated and oppressed. Can you do it or not?”

  “The answer, Joe, is a qualified ‘shmaybe’.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, maybe it will work and maybe it won’t. I won’t know until I get a string of microwormholes out there and see what the data looks like. This is not simple math, you numbskull. The damping field we’re trapped in is being generated by eight ships at various and changing distances from us. That is eight overlapping sets of vibrations, that are each tuned to be random and unpredictable. The interactions of those eight waves makes them even more chaotic. But the real issue is the state of our jump drive. Like I told you, we sort of dorked it up when we jumped in. I’ve slapped it together with duct tape and a prayer, but it won’t take us far even if there was no damping field. Wherever we jump to, the kitties will be able to track us and jump in to surround us. A short jump doesn’t do anything other than delay our demise by a short time.”

  “Could we jump to the other side of the star? They won’t see us there.”

  “That’s too far,” he said with glum resignation. “We might manage a jump that far if there was absolutely no damping effect, but, seriously, even my magnificence can’t totally quiet the vibrations of spacetime. If we can jump, if, it is going to be rough and it’s going to be noisy. It will also be the last jump for several days, until I can strip the drive down and rebuild it.”

  “Shit,” I groaned. “That’s it, then? Even if you can partly cancel the damping effect, we have no safe place to jump to?”

  “Colonel?” Simms got my attention. “What about the trick we pulled on our very first mission together?”

  “Uh,” I had no idea what she was talking about. “Which trick?”

  “Skippy jumped fourteen Kristang starships into a gas giant,” she reminded me.

  “Ooooooh,” Skippy whistled. “Wow. Now that is crazy talk. Hmm, if we jumped low into the atmosphere of a gas giant, no one would see where we went to. It could take days for the shockwave effect to reach the cloud tops, where the Maxolhx would see it. Also, ooh, ooh!” He bubbled over with enthusiasm. “The effect of jumping into a gravity well would distort the jump wormhole so badly, the kitties could not use the data to figure out where we went. I like it!”

  “XO, good thinking,” I let Simms down gently. “But, uh, didn’t jumping into an area already occupied by matter destroy those lizard ships?”

  “It did, Joe,” Skippy confirmed. “Don’t be too hasty. Jennifer may be onto something. There is a gas giant planet in a highly elliptical orbit, that we might be able to jump to. Maybe. I’m not making any promises.”

  “What about,” I closed my eyes to search way back in my memory. “The whole thing about jumping inside a planet would tear a ship apart? You told us something like, the gravity well would distort the wormhole.”

  “For crappy low-tech Kristang starships, that is true. Ah, it’s also true for high-tech Maxolhx ships. But, but, the magnificence of me is able to reach through the jump wormhole and stabilize its endpoint long enough for us to emerge safely. I think. Truthfully, I’ve never done this before, you know?”

  “Ok,” for some reason, I was arguing against the only plan that had a possibility of our survival. It all sounded too good to be true. “You can fix the gravity well problem-”

  “Maybe. I said maybe I can deal with it.”

  “Right. We will still be emerging into a region of space that is already occupied by matter. The atmosphere of a gas giant is dense. Like, really thick.”

  “That is also true. Damn, Joe, why are you such a buzzkill today?”

  “Because I don’t want to jump from the frying pan into-” What was a good metaphor? “Something worse than a frying pan. Like a nuclear fireball, when our atoms try to emerge into space occupied by other atoms.”

  “Nuclear. Fireball,” Skippy repeated slowly.

  “Don’t be an ass. I know it will be a different type of explosion. You know what I-”

  “No. That’s not it. I wasn’t mocking you. Joe, you just gave me an idea that might possibly make this work.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, heh heh,” he chuckled. “You are not going to like this.”

  I groaned. The bridge crew joined me, because they knew what a ‘Well heh heh’ meant.

  Skippy explained.

  He was one hundred ten percent correct. I did not like it.

  Ok, well, his idea did involve blowing shit up, and as a guy, the inner me was very much in favor of trying it. Plus, we didn’t have a better option. Or any other option.

  “Smythe,” I called our STAR team leader, who was in their section of the ship, suited up in case we found a use for infantry action. “Get a nuke and strap it aboard the DeLorean.”

  “Better make it two, Joe,” Skippy advised.

  “Two nukes. We need two nukes aboard the DeLorean. And dial their yield up to ‘Eleven’, got that?”

  “Understood,” Smythe acknowledged.

  I felt he was owed an explanation. “Listen, you might think my order is odd, so-”

  “Sir? Stuffing nukes into a dropship is not even the oddest thing that has happened to me today,” he chided me with dry British humor.

  “Oh. Good point. Signal when the nukes are in place.”

  “Colonel?” Reed asked. “Should I get the DeLorean ready for launch?”

  “Nope,” Skippy answered for me. “My bots are already warming up the DeLorean now.”

  “We don’t,” Reed looked at me. “Don’t need a pilot, in case something goes wrong?”

  “Reed,” I told her gently. “The DeLorean isn’t coming back.”

  “Sir,” the look she gave me was not fear, it was intense determination. “If this doesn’t work, we are all dead.”

  “Thank you for the offer, Fireball,” Skippy teased her with the callsign she hated. “I got this. If anything goes wrong, it will happen too fast for you to react anyway.”

  “Reed,” I added. “If anyone is flying the DeLorean, it will be me. Skippy, we can go as soon as the DeLorean is ready?”

  “Um, no. Joe, you are still thinking like a ground-pounder.”

  “Shit. What did I forget this time?”

  “I’ll give you a hint, two words. Relative. Velocity.”

  “Oh,” I sagged in my chair. “Crap!” What Skippy meant is, Valkyrie was flying this way, imagine me pointing to the right, while the planet we wanted to jump into was moving that way, imagine me pointing to the left. Like the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz, my arms were crossed and pointing in opposite directions. Starships emerged from a jump with the same speed and direction they had before the jump. If we couldn’t get Valkyrie moving at roughly the same speed and direction as the target planet. We would hit the thick atmosphere like slamming into a wall, and that would pancake the ship nose to tail like stomping on a tin can. Because the damned planet was also rotating, we had to jump into a part of the atmosphere that was rotating in roughly the same direction our ship was traveling.

  Man, I freakin’ hate math. “Is this all a waste of time, then?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  “No, it’s not a waste of time,” he assured me. “But the vector of our pesky momentum is taking us too fast, in the wrong direction. We can’t aim for the closest gas giant planet. It is currently orbiting sideways to our course, and much too slowly. There is another gas giant, a really big one like Jupiter, that is farther away. Like, uncomfortably far for us to jump given the current poor state of our drive. Ah, don’t worry, somehow I will make it work. Or not, and you’ll never know the difference because you monkeys will all die instantly. So, really, there is no downside, huh?”

  With my hands, I mimed choking him. It made me feel better. “Can we match course and speed with the second planet?”

  “The short answer is ‘No’. The long answer is, close enough. We need to start altering course now, though. Navigation system has been programmed.”

  “Reed?”

  “I see it
, Sir,” she acknowledged. “Initiating course change now. Oh. Sir, are you sure about this?”

  “Oh, Crap.” On the main display, I saw what had caused her concern. The turn was taking us toward the enemy. “Skippy?!”

  “Yes, we have to decelerate. We will not be flying directly toward the enemy cruisers, but they will be approaching much faster.”

  “Hey, I hate to point out the flaws in your genius plan,” I laid the sarcasm on thick. “Did you consider that if those cruisers pound Valkyrie to dust, we won’t be able to attempt your next wacky stunt?”

  He sucked in a breath. “Oops. Gosh, no, I hadn’t considered that. Yes, I thought of that, you moron! Through the magic of mathematics, which you should try learning sometime, I have calculated that we will have a comfortable fifty-two second margin between the time when our velocity matches the planet, and the time when the main guns of the enemy will be within effective range of us.”

  “Fifty-two seconds is comfortable?”

  “Sure. Easy-peasy, Joe. Um, actually, the longer we can wait, the better. At the fifty-two second mark, we will still be traveling seven thousand kilometers per hour relative to the target planet.”

  “That doesn’t sound safe to me.”

  “It’s not optimal,” he admitted. “If we could wait until the thirty-eight second mark, that would be great.”

  Running a hand through my hair, I let out a long breath, keeping it quiet to avoid alarming the crew. Any more than they were already justifiably alarmed. “That makes me nervous, Skippy. The effective range of directed energy weapons is just an estimate. They could hurt us from much farther away.”

  “It won’t do us any good to avoid enemy fire, if we burn up from smacking into the atmosphere way too fast.”

  “I hear you. Ok, we’ll aim for thirty-eight seconds. We’ll need to launch the DeLorean on the side of the ship facing away from the enemy, so they can’t hit it.”

  “Good idea,” he agreed.

  “Simms?” I wanted her opinion. “XO, does this bad idea sound any worse than our usual bad ideas?”