Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  We used microwormholes for instantaneous communication with both ships. The display normally glowed green with simple idiot lights when the microwormholes were active. Now all the indicators were flashing an orange ‘Loss of Signal’.

  Ohhhhh shit.

  The microwormholes were all gone. Keeping those tiny spacetime warps open required constant effort by Skippy. When he lost focus, they had collapsed. With the Dutchman parked twelve lightminutes away, I wouldn’t be able to get a signal to them until it was too late.

  PING!

  Something bounced off the hull.

  That was big trouble.

  The local defense network knew that an unknown dropship was in orbit, they probably had gotten a good enough look to determine the ship was a Dragon. Whatever Skippy was doing to mask us from sensors, it was apparently confusing their satellite targeting system badly enough that they had already resorted to a backup system: shotgun pellets. Unlike a real shotgun, these pellets were not weapons. They were tiny dust particles shot out in a broad cone shape at the general direction of a suspected contact. When a particle ricocheted away from a straight flight path, the enemy knew it had hit something, even if that something was invisible.

  The technology was crude, it was only useful at short-range, and it was effective. Without help from Skippy and with the Dragon’s computer still resetting, I had to guess which satellite had fired the pellets at me. Then I had to rely on spatial memory to tell me where the satellite was in relation to my Dragon. The ‘ping’ sound had come from behind my seat, back above my head. On the upper hull. I gently turned us away, hoping to throw off the aim of the satellite’s next effort to locate me.

  “Skippy, come on, work with me here.”

  He wasn’t working with me. He wasn’t helping. At first, I thought he was being silent, then my ears picked up a barely-audible sound, and I boosted the volume of my earpiece.

  “Wow. That’s, wow. Incredible. Oh shit. I gotta- Wow.” He was muttering the same thing over and over. Likely, he couldn’t even hear me.

  PING.

  Another dust pellet hit.

  I was in trouble.

  Big trouble.

  Skippy was no longer screwing with the sensor and communication systems of the Kristang on Rikers. By now, their command organization must have learned or at least suspected that their precious human property had been abducted. They also knew an unknown Kristang Dragon was in orbit. That was trouble for me.

  The big trouble was that the Thuranin would soon see my Dragon appear, and see the local defense satellites shooting at something. They almost certainly were also listening to the clan leaders on the planet screaming for answers about where the human captives had gone, and what the hell was going on.

  Escaping from the local defense network, without Skippy’s help, would be extremely difficult.

  Escaping from a Thuranin starship was impossible.

  “Captain!” Margaret Adams gasped from the Flying Dutchman’s Combat Information Center. “We just lost the microwormholes! Both of them!”

  “What?” Chang turned to look through the composite-glass partition that separated the bridge and CIC. “How could-”

  “Colonel Chang,” Nagatha interrupted. “Just before the microwormholes collapsed, the Dragon carrying Colonel Bishop and Skippy dropped its stealth field.”

  “Why would they do that?” Chang demanded. “Bishop has to know he will be exposed.”

  “I think something is wrong with Skippy,” Nagatha’s voice was shaky. “There were indications the Dragon was losing power, before the signal was cut off.”

  “Ohhhh,” Chang groaned. “I knew this was going too well! Nagatha, recalculate the jump coordinates. We need to go in now.”

  “Colonel Chang, that is not advisable,” the ship’s AI warned. “Our velocity relative to the four ships we are to retrieve is still too high. They would be unable to slow down enough before they reached us.”

  “Pilots,” Chang immediately understood the situation. “Step on it, get us moving. Nagatha, calculate a jump that will bring us in front of those Dragons as soon as our relative speeds make a recovery survivable.”

  “Calculating now.”

  “Colonel?” Adams got his attention from the CIC, actually waving an arm like she was a student. “What about recovering Bishop? And Skippy?” She added as an afterthought.

  “They are on the other side of the planet, moving in the opposite direction.”

  “But-”

  “Gunny,” he added softly. “I hear you. We’ll go in for Bishop when we can.”

  Adams wavered on her feet, reaching out a hand to steady herself. “That, that,” her stuttering had not returned. Her mouth was just too dry to form words. “That may be too late.”

  “The Dragons with the rescued prisoners, and this ship, are going this way,” he pointed right with his left index finger. “Bishop’s Dragon is going this way,’ his right index finger pointed to the left. “We can’t pick him up right now, it’s not physically possible. We have to recover the four ships, jump away, then accelerate to match course and speed with Bishop. If we jump in before we’re ready, we will just be painting a bigger target on him. You underst-” He realized Nagatha had been silent. He slammed a fist on the command chair’s armrest. “Nagatha, is the jump calculated yet?”

  “I am working on it. Colonel Chang, I am experiencing, difficulties.”

  Chang shared an alarmed look with Adams. “What kind of difficulties?”

  “I cannot identify the nature of the problem. It appears that something is interfering with my processing ability. It is affecting the speed at which I can calculate a revised jump coordinate.”

  “You can’t do it? Should we delay while you analyze the problem?”

  “I can. Colonel, the interference is spreading. My recommendation is we jump now, while I am still capable of acting as the ship’s primary control system.”

  Chang didn’t reply right away. If they jumped in to recover the Dragons, and the Dutchman was unable to jump away, he would have killed them all. “Nagatha, are you sure we can jump away, after we take the Dragons aboard?”

  “Yes. The outbound jump to rendezvous with Valkyrie is already loaded into the jump navigation subsystem.”

  Hearing that made his decision easy. “Then we are ‘Go’ for the recovery.”

  “Revised jump is loaded into the navigation system,” the ship’s AI confirmed. “Counting down from twelve, eleven-”

  “Gunny,” Chang had one eye on the countdown timer and the other watching the pilot, who had a finger poised over the button to initiate the warping of spacetime. “We lost connection to Bishop, and to Valkyrie. Simms isn’t going to sit out there and do nothing.” He knew Bishop’s standing order was for Valkyrie to do exactly that; to wait until he ordered the battlecruiser into the fight. Under no circumstance was Simms to expose the ghost ship’s involvement, unless Bishop specifically instructed Valkyrie to jump in. Those orders were very clear. Those orders also never envisioned a total loss of communications. Chang knew Simms would not wait long, before using her best judgement regardless of standing orders that were irrelevant.

  Adams’s reply was to nod numbly, and turn her focus back to her duty in the CIC.

  Nagatha had continued the countdown with “-three, two. one, jump.”

  The Dutchman jumped in before my Dragon’s computer was fully rebooted, so all I knew from the limited sensor data available was that a gamma ray burst had been detected. Trying to scroll manually through the raw data was a frustrating waste of time, the display kept glitching as the system still wasn’t ready. All I did know, from the clock on my zPhone, was the Dutchman wasn’t scheduled to jump in yet, so the ship had to be Thuranin.

  I was seriously screwed. No, we were all seriously screwed. There were other dropships, crammed full of Pirates and Commandos and the people we were attempting to rescue. They were the priority, I had to draw the attention of the enemy ships away from them.
As far as I knew, the other Dragons had never lost their stealth fields, the enemy ship would not immediately know they were there. All I had to do was send out an active sensor pulse, or ignite my Dragon’s booster motors, and the attention of that ship and every defense satellite around the planet would be drawn to me. The sensor system did not need to be fully rebooted for me to send out an active pulse, all I had to do was flip up the cover over the-

  No.

  Shit!

  Skippy was important to the survival of humanity, I couldn’t risk him being captured. Without Skippy, we had no way to open the Backstop wormhole when it was repositioned near Earth. Or the other wormholes that were needed to create a route out to the beta site. He was more important than the lives of two hundred people in four dropships. Again, I had to make a choice between the lives of a few people, and the lives of many more people.

  No, that wasn’t right.

  I did not have to make that choice, it was not one or the other. What I could do was eject Skippy before I drew attention to my Dragon. We were moving faster than the planet’s escape velocity, he would continue on away from the planet and Chang or Simms could recover him later.

  Yeah.

  That was the plan.

  Damn it. That little shithead was still mumbling to himself. He was stuck in a loop or something, he wasn’t listening. I couldn’t even say goodbye to him. Probably he wouldn’t even notice when I tossed him out the airlock.

  Time to move. According to the event timer on the console in front of me, only four seconds had passed since the gamma ray burst, it just felt like forever because my slow brain had trouble making really obvious decisions. For all I knew, the Thuranin ship had already detected the other Dragons and-

  No, that’s not all I knew. Even from the raw data, I could tell the gamma rays recorded on my Dragon’s sensors were scattered and refracted in a distinctive effect I had seen many times in training. That ship had jumped in on the other side of the planet, near where the other Dragons were flying toward their planned rendezvous with the Dutchman. What were the odds the Thuranin got lucky and-

  I am so stupid.

  This job would be a lot easier if my brain worked better.

  The dropship’s sensor system was not ready to interpret incoming data for me. I didn’t need the system right then, because my freakin’ zPhone could handle the simple task of identifying the gamma ray burst. A few taps of the zPhone screen was all it took to sync the device with the Dragon, and I had an answer: the gamma rays were from a Ruhar starship.

  Unless the Universe had chosen an odd way to screw with me, the gamma rays must have come from the Flying Dutchman. With Skippy’s help, Nagatha had modified that ship’s new Maxolhx jump drive system, to generate the jump signature typical of Ruhar warships.

  Slowly, carefully, with a shaky hand, I closed the cover protecting the button that would send out an active sensor pulse. It is frightening how close my stupidity came to getting me killed right then.

  Instead of tossing Skippy out an airlock and effectively setting off fireworks to let every sensor in the area know where I was, I kept quiet and watched the defense satellites ignore me while they went into action against the new threat. The Kristang satellites had identified the gamma ray burst as Ruhar in origin, and by that time, they must have seen the false image projected by our Pirate ship’s advanced stealth field. Though I could not see the action directly, I did know the satellites were lighting up something with maser cannons and volleys of missile launches. Even before my Dragon completed its reboot and I had access to full passive sensors, I could see several satellites exploding as the Dutchman returned fire. Chang was taking out the defenses that were best able to threaten the vulnerable dropships. Around the planet, satellites were blowing up in spectacular fashion, it was like watching a firework show. It was frustrating not being able to view the action directly, I had to guess what was happening. Chang also had to be somewhat frustrated because he could not use his ship’s full capabilities, he could only do what a Ruhar warship was capable of, or risk blowing our cover story.

  The battle raged for sixty-seven seconds before there was another gamma ray burst, that I identified as coming from the good old Dutchman. Pumping a fist, I shouted a cheer that echoed around the Dragon’s empty cabin. Chang would not have jumped away until he recovered all dropships and their passengers, I had to hope none of the Dragons had been hit during the battle. Even if the dropships flew into the docking bays unscathed, I knew the recovery must have been hard on the people crammed in the cabins. Making the rendezvous early would not have given time for the Dragons to slow to a proper approach speed, they had to rely on the emergency netting and suspensor fields to avoid a fatal crash. There were bound to be bruises and even broken bones aboard the Dragons, a rude shock for the abductees who had already endured so much suffering.

  Continuing an evasive course away from the planet, I crossed my fingers and said a silent prayer that the defense network had forgotten about me. My Dragon had not been swept by an active sensor pulse or dust particles since twenty seconds before the Dutchman jumped in, so it was looking good for me, despite whatever the hell was going on with Skippy. All I had to do was keep quiet and fly gently to put distance between myself and the planet. Assuming the Thuranin were in the area, no way could they have missed seeing the Dutchman jump in and-

  Another gamma ray burst. The console immediately identified it as Thuranin.

  Shit, that was fast.

  A powerful active sensor pulse swept over my Dragon. On the console, a yellow light was flashing. Thirty-one percent probability the pulse had allowed the Thuranin to pin-point my location. Another pulse washed over the dropship. Thirty-three percent.

  Before speaking, I took a sip of lukewarm water from the spout inside my helmet. “Skippy? Hey, buddy, I could really use your help right now. Skippy?”

  He continued mumbling like he was stoned out of his mind. Maybe he was. He thought he had unlocked hidden memories, but for all I knew, he had just taken down a barrier and allowed another hidden computer worm to attack him.

  His can was not glowing at all, just a shiny chrome-like silver reflecting lights on the copilot console. Loosening the straps that held me into the pilot couch, I leaned over to touch him. Nothing. No reaction at all.

  Getting desperate, I tugged off my right glove, and stretched out my bare fingers to-

  “Ow! Damn it! Ow!”

  He zapped me. It hurt. Like sticking a fork into a wall plug, not that I ever did that more than two or three times when I was little. Jamming the glove back on over my numb fingers, I snapped at him. “What was that for?”

  “Oh, hey, Joe.”

  “Why the hell did you-” Focus, Joe, I told myself. Focus now, yell at him later. “What is going on with you, buddy? Sounds like you are dealing with some serious shit, huh?”

  “You have no idea,” that time his can glowed a little spark of dark purple. That was a color I wasn’t familiar with. “Joe, wheeew,” he imitated a heavy sigh that trailed off into despair. “I was wrong, about everything. I feel like such a fool.”

  “Uh huh, yeah. Let’s talk about it. But first, get the stealth field fully operational, Ok?”

  “It’s not?”

  “Have you been paying attention at all?”

  “I guess not. Joe, it doesn’t matter. None of this matters.”

  “It matters a lot to me. I want to hear all this heavy stuff you are dealing with. To do that, I have to be alive, you know? There’s a Thuranin ship out there looking for us.”

  “Oh for- Do I have to do everything? Damn monkeys are useless,” he grumbled. “The stupid stealth field is operating normally again. We will be below the Thuranin ship’s detection threshold, unless they target this specific area.”

  That was good news. The Thuranin wouldn’t hammer my location with active sensor pulses unless they knew where I was, and they wouldn’t know where I was unless I did something stupid.

  Not
e to self: do not do anything stupid.

  Despite all the stuff that had gone wrong with the mission, including Skippy going off to ‘find himself’ or whatever he was doing right then, we could get away cleanly. All I had to do was coast away from the planet, out to a distance where I could send a message to one of the alternate listening points, and schedule a rendezvous with the Dutchman. It would be a boring couple of days, stuck in the cramped Dragon with an emotional Skippy, fortunately I had a lot of experience with being cooped up with that asshole. We would get on each other’s nerves, then ignore each other, and we would survive until we were picked up. Smythe’s concern about launching the operation on a Tuesday had not resulted in disaster, I needed to remind him of that. First, Skippy needed to be coached out of his current funk.

  It did bother me that he had complained about monkeys being useless, it bothered me more that he had not been his usual snarky self when he said it. He really meant it.

  “I’m here, I’m listening. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

  “You wouldn’t understand. You can’t.”

  My usual reply would have been ‘Try me’. Something about his tone warned me to be very careful about what I said. Whatever was going on with him, he didn’t feel like joking about it. “I know I am not capable of understanding you or whatever you learned from your memories. Sometimes, it helps to talk to another person even if they can’t help you. It’s like, talking makes you organize your thoughts, and think about the situation in ways you wouldn’t have by yourself.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Will you try it? We don’t have anything else to do for the next two or three days.”

  “Fine.” He simulated taking a deep breath. “You better hold onto your seat, because this is going to blow your mind. It blew my mind.”

  He told me everything. He spoke in a calm, quiet tone that was devoid of his usual snarkiness. He wasn’t even arrogant, he just laid out the facts as he now knew them.