Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  What the probes did not detect, because they had not been programmed to look for, because they did not know such objects existed, was microwormholes. If the probes had been able to see those nanoscale flaws in the underlying fabric of spacetime, they would have been concerned.

  Because the target coordinates were saturated by microwormholes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  “Bingo!” Skippy’s exultant cry made me almost jump out of the command chair, where I had just parked my butt for what I thought would be a long wait. Simms and I were pulling duty on the bridge, we each got six hours on, six off. That left only five or less hours for sleep and was guaranteed to make me cranky. With such a small crew, we didn’t have much choice, everyone was standing six-hour watches. Our chief pilot Reed was getting rack time on a cot she set up across the passageway from the main door to the bridge, and Simms was crashing on my couch. Sleeping in my cabin saved her about twenty seconds of running in a crisis. Those twenty seconds could make a huge difference in a combat situation.

  Her sleeping in my cabin also meant I was finding long hairs in my sink and tangled in my toothbrush. Also, when I walked into my cabin, the place had a faint scent of jasmine or whatever she used for shampoo or lotion. Neither of those things bothered me, in fact I was thinking about switching to another cabin and designating mine as quarters for the on-call crew. But it would have been nice if the long hairs in my sink came from a woman who was sleeping with me in the cabin, and not on the couch if you know what I mean.

  Anyway, that’s not what Skippy was shouting about.

  “What is it?” The holographic display at the front of the bridge was still new to me. Sometimes I missed the old-fashioned flatscreens of the Flying Dutchman’s bridge.

  “A single Maxolhx Vindicator-class heavy cruiser jumped into the rendezvous zone,” he explained.

  A glance at the simple clock confirmed my inner judgment. “Crap, that’s early.” It was early, less than twelve minutes after Skippy’s earliest estimate of when the Maxolhx might arrive. “Do we have any indication this is a problem?”

  “No, Joe,” Skippy calmed my fears. “It could be totally random. Or the kitties are being super extra cautious, because of the big bad ghost ship that is terrorizing the space lanes, hee hee,” he chuckled with satisfaction. “Should I alert the ready crew?”

  “No! No, let Simms get sleep. The Bosphuraq aren’t arriving early, are they?”

  “Not that I know of. Based on what we know of their flight plans, the star carrier with the battleships can’t get here any earlier, and the other two star carriers would be foolish to arrive at the rendezvous before the big guns are here. The Bosphuraq know the Maxolhx could be intercepting their message traffic.”

  “Right. We wait, then. No change of plans,” I decided, ignoring my own fears. “Hey, what was the type of that ship again?”

  “It’s a Vindicator-class heavy cruiser, the same type I expected. We have trained against that type of ship, we know its strengths and weaknesses. Why?”

  “That’s an odd name,” I observed trying to remember what ‘Vindicator’ meant. My useless brain was drawing a blank.

  “No more odd than any other name. The Maxolhx believe their continued success justifies, or vindicates, their position as rightful rulers of the galaxy.”

  “Rulers,” I snorted. “Yeah, they might want to tell the Rindhalu about that.”

  “I said rightful, Joe, not actual. The kitties strongly believe that only the ongoing oppression of the spiders prevents them from bringing peaceful order to the galaxy.”

  “Peaceful?”

  “A peaceful order under their oppressive rule, Joe.”

  “Yeah, I vote ‘No’ on that. Ok, we wait.”

  The enemy cruiser flew around dropping off probes, or that is what Skippy guessed it was doing. Even he had a tough time tracking it through the advanced stealth field. Then it jumped away, and we later detected a burst of gamma radiation coming from a spot three lightminutes away. Technically, we did not detect the actual gamma ray burst, for Maxolhx ships could direct ninety six percent of the gamma radiation into a narrowly focused beam. That gave them a major advantage in combat. Most other ships could not avoid lighting up the sky light like a strobe light when they emerged from jump. The Maxolhx could tweak their jump wormholes so they dumped the residual radiation in any direction they wanted, usually away from their enemy’s sensors. We had the same technology aboard Valkyrie, except the awesomeness of Skippy had increased the efficiency to ninety-nine point two percent.

  Or so he said. We had not actually tested that efficiency in action.

  What Skippy detected was not the thin gamma burst itself, he picked up its backscatter off stray hydrogen atoms. Eleven hydrogen atoms, to be specific. That was three more, he had smugly announced, than he needed to determine the enemy’s location.

  With the two Maxolhx heavy cruisers having set their trap, we waited. By the time we reached the window when the Bosphuraq battleships were scheduled to arrive, I was getting used to six hours on, six off. My duty shift had begun four hours ago, and I hadn’t been able to sleep during my off time, so I was existing on caffeine and adrenaline. Simms had finished her shift in the command chair, then walked over to man the weapons station. No way was she going to sleep anyway, and I needed my best people on the bridge.

  With that thought, my eyes automatically darted over to the sensor station, where Margaret Adams filled in when she was not training with the STAR team. She was not yet cleared to return to duty. That had to be killing her, I knew, knowing the ship and everyone around her were doing something, while she waited for her brain to get back up to speed. Somewhere, probably in her cabin, she was watching a data feed from the bridge, and willing her body to heal faster.

  Enough of that. In combat, I could not afford distractions.

  The clock stopped counting down to the target time, and began counting up. Ten minutes, then twenty. Then an hour, with nothing happening. It got to the point where I had serious regrets about drinking too much coffee, when Skippy sang out again. “Just picked up a gamma ray burst! Signature is that of a Bosphuraq battleship.”

  “Battleship?” My puzzlement was matched by several of the bridge crew. “A single battleship? Not a star carrier?”

  “Single battleship. It is twenty seven lightminutes away from our position.”

  “Something’s wrong.” Slowly, I raised my fist and pounded it on the armrest.

  “Nothing is wrong, Joe. I anticipated this might happen. Think about it.”

  Think about- Looking at the holographic display, I saw the rendezvous point in the middle, the estimated location of the two Maxolhx ships three lightminutes away, and now the lone battleship. Why-

  Duh.

  Of course.

  “That battleship is not alone,” I answered, feeling proud of myself. “The others are out there, probably forming a ring around the rendezvous point. We haven’t seen the other ships yet, because the gamma rays from their inbound jumps haven’t reached us yet.”

  “Very good, Joe!”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m a clever monkey, I should get myself a juice box. Skippy, that’s no good. I shouldn’t have to think about it. The speed-of-light lag is something that should automatically be part of how I view space combat. We all should,” I added when I saw Reed nodding her head at the pilot station.

  “You’re getting there, Joe,” Skippy gave me rare encouragement, making me wonder what insult he would slam me with next. But he didn’t.

  “Oh. Thanks. You keep giving hints to us filthy monkeys, please. And, I see another battleship just popped up on the display.” After a couple minutes, all four of the expected battleships appeared, plus their star carrier. The five ships must have been exchanging messages via tightbeam transmissions we couldn’t detect from that distance, because the star carrier jumped away far enough that we didn’t detect its inbound gamma ray burst until much later.

  “All right, the
star carrier has cleared the battlespace,” I announced to the bridge crew, who already had that information. “Skippy, is there any sign the battleships won’t do what we expect next?”

  “No. They have been using active scanners, but their sensors have not detected us, the Maxolhx ships, their probes or my microwormholes. From backscatter, I picked up a fragment of a message that might have been their signal for ‘All Clear’, it is too faint to tell for sure.”

  “We keep waiting, then.”

  Waiting sucked and there was nothing we could do about it. What we expected to happen next was for the two transport star carriers to jump in far away, within a few lightminutes of the star carrier that had been hauling the battleships. If they received an ‘All Clear’ message from a battleship, the two star carriers would proceed to the rendezvous point, and the battleships would join them for the relatively short flight to Planet Voodoo. When the two star carriers and the four battleships were conveniently gathered in a small area at the rendezvous point, we expected all hell to break loose.

  Those battleships had a choice of tactics, none of them good. Normally, while preparing for action against a peer like the Jeraptha, two or three of the big capital ships would have remained a lightminute or so away from the rendezvous point where they would not be such easy targets. In this action, when they anticipated that any fight would be against their patrons the Maxolhx, the battleships needed to be together so they could mass their firepower on the enemy. Four Bosphuraq battleships against one Maxolhx heavy cruiser would be a decent fight, at least for a while. Long enough for the star carriers and the transport ships they were loaded with to get away. What we knew, and the birdbrains did not, was that their opposition was a pair of heavy cruisers. The battle would be a slaughter.

  Actually, we knew a lot of other info that wasn’t available to the Bosphuraq. We knew the kitties had laid a trap and were waiting to spring it. The birds knew it was possible they would encounter trouble, but they had tagged it as a low probability. After all, Planet Voodoo was an unimportant place and not located within an easy wormhole path to their patron’s territory.

  We knew the number and types of ships the kitties had, while the birds certainly did not anticipate matching up against capital ships. Based on their history of joint fleet exercises with the Maxolhx, the birdbrains rightly expected they might encounter a pair of light cruisers, perhaps a squadron of destroyers. That is what the kitties normally would have assigned to strike a lightly-defended target, and the Bosphuraq understood standard Maxolhx tactics.

  What they didn’t know is that our ghost ship had screwed everything up for them. Our hit-and-run attacks had forced the Maxolhx to change tactics, to assign heavier combatants or larger numbers of ships. So, there were two heavy cruisers waiting to trap and pound those battleships and defenseless star carriers.

  We also had a rough idea of how the Maxolhx planned to conduct the attack. That gave us an advantage, because it limited the area we needed to cover.

  All we had to do was wait.

  Wait, and worry that there might be something important I had forgotten about.

  The next event did not require an announcement by Skippy, because I was watching the display when it happened. Our sensors picked up the gamma ray burst of a star carrier jumping in near one of the battleships, and based on the signature, we knew it was one of the star carriers hauling empty passenger transport ships.

  “Skippy,” I didn’t take my eyes away from the holographic display. “Call the ready crew to duty stations. It’s showtime.”

  Simms had not even sat down at one of the weapons stations when a battleship emerged at the rendezvous point. Once all the players were there, the Bosphuraq were wisely not wasting time. They would assemble all six ships in a protective formation, with the two vulnerable star carriers at the center, and proceed to Planet Voodoo. That was the plan.

  The Maxolhx had a different plan.

  The first sign of trouble for the battleships was when they detected a damping field forming around them. That was an indication of an Oh-shit level of danger but not yet a total disaster. The crews of all ships knew they had a window of opportunity to escape before the damping field was firmly established, and all ships maintained sufficient charge for an emergency jump.

  The rule of jumping away immediately upon detection of a damping field was true when the opposing force was a peer species. It was not true when the enemy was the supremely-capable Maxolhx, and especially not true when the entire area had been saturated with probes that sent out powerful damping waves.

  Seeing the strength of the damping field around them go from faint ripples to gale-force waves in a heartbeat, the crews still did not entirely panic. They correctly assessed the waves must be generated by relatively small satellites, that could not maintain such a power output for long. They were correct, and the ships turned and burned to disperse out toward the edge of the field, while the weapons of the battleships targeted the now-visible probes.

  It didn’t do them any good.

  Two of the probes had been knocked out by railgun fire from battleships, and the damping field strength was already ebbing, when two large senior-species warships jumped in to join the party.

  That was when the birdbrain’s level of danger spiked from Oh-shit to We’re-doomed. Watching the action on the bridge display, I reluctantly had to admire the professionalism and pure guts of the battleships' crews. They knew they were very likely dead, yet they did not flinch from their duty to protect the star carriers. Or, they knew they were very likely dead, and figured they might as well try to take some of their MF-ing patrons with them.

  If we had jumped our ghost ship in right then, we might have saved those battleships by luring the Maxolhx away. We could have simply stayed where we were, and dropped our sophisticated stealth field. Sadly for the crews of the battleships, saving them was not on my To-Do list that day.

  We were impressed when the battleships fired on their patrons immediately, without wasting any time with useless talk. Both sides knew why they were there, and it was not to negotiate. The Maxolhx did order their clients to surrender, knowing they were wasting their breath and following formalities anyway. The sincerity of the Surrender-and-you-won’t-be-harmed message was rendered less heartwarming when the transmissions were received at the same time maser beams fired by the heavy cruisers seared into the shields of the battleships.

  Maybe the kitties should have sent a fruit basket.

  We were very much impressed when all four battleships, having sustained significant damage in the opening minutes of the fight, turned toward their enemy so their bulk shielded the star carriers as those ships tried to run away. As the star carriers ran under full acceleration, they ejected the eighteen transport ships they had been carrying, and those ships scattered in any direction that was not toward the enemy. So far, the kitties had ignored the vulnerable civilian ships, knowing the damping field was now reinforced throughout the area and the transports were not going far. Destroy or disable the battleships, the tactic was, and then the transports could be hunted down later.

  If we were impressed by the bravery and professionalism of the Bosphuraq, the Maxolhx had to be more than a little annoyed by their clients. Despite the constant punishment coming from the heavy cruisers, all four battleships concentrated their fire on a single enemy ship. That was sure suicide, and the only way to inflict worthwhile damage before the battleships were out of the fight.

  It was interesting to see the fight happen for real. Skippy had shown us simulations of a contest between four of the Bosphuraq’s most modern and capable battleships against two senior-species heavy cruisers, and the actual fight was not much different from what we expected. Still, it was awe-inspiring to see it in real-time. None of the warships involved had bothered to engage stealth or deploy decoys, because the gigawatts of energy they were pouring into space lit them up like a Christmas tree. Without stealth, and with all of the ships unable to jump away, it was a s
tand-up fight within a bubble less than two lightseconds across.

  “One of the battleships is out of the fight,” Simms warned. “Enemy is continuing to hit it.”

  “Wait a second,” I counseled, having run through that exact scenario in simulations. The Maxolhx could be intending to pound that crippled battleship to dust. Or it could simply be that maser beams, railgun darts and missiles they fired before the battleship lost power, were still in flight.

  “Enemy fire is being redirected,” Simms confirmed my thought. On the display, we could see missiles curving as they were redirected toward other targets.

  “Ok,” I clapped my hands softly to avoid startling anyone who had fingers poised above buttons. “We have what we want; a disabled Bosphuraq battleship. It’s our turn. Simms, weapons free.”

  “Aye aye,” she acknowledged, and despite her reminding me that she would rather have stayed on Avalon, there was a smile on her face as she unleashed hell.

  There is a saying I learned in infantry training; If you can see it, you can kill it. Or something like that, I’ve heard many versions of that old truism. That truth also applies to air combat and probably sea warfare, my experience training was as a ground-pounder. Basically, identifying the location of a target means that you can deliver ordnance on it. Either by yourself, with a rifle, grenade, or heavier weapons like a mortar or Javelin missile, a fireteam can do a lot of damage. For targets beyond the effective range of weapons available to a platoon, you can use the most deadly device ever developed: a radio. One of my instructors told me that four soldiers with rifles are a fireteam, but one soldier with a radio is an army. With a radio, you can call in battalion artillery, or close air support, and rain hellfire down on a target.

  Anyway, the point is, pretty much anything you can see can be killed.

  When I got to Paradise, and in training on Camp Alpha before that, nothing I saw changed the idea of being able to kill any target I could locate. With the ability to call in fire support from orbit, where every square meter of a planet’s surface can be covered by a single warship within forty minutes, that idea I learned way back in basic training was reinforced.