“If you make it a Simpsons marathon, I’ll watch it with you.”
“Deal. Talk to you later.”
‘Later’ meant two hours later. When Skippy re-emerged from his self-imposed Fortress of Solitude, he announced that all five remaining microwormholes were in position, fully checked out and ready. “Ok, we’re ready,” his voice actually trembled a bit, which scared me. Either he was super tired and making his voice tremble so we would understand the strain he was under, or he really was losing control. “The stealth field is effectively absorbing and containing the gamma ray pulses I have been sending into the cavern. The Maxolhx have not reacted in any way, I am fairly confident our activity thus far has not been detected. Of course, it helps that their sensor coverage is poor near the factory complex.”
“Hey, that’s great. You Ok, buddy? Nagatha,” I added because I worried Skippy wouldn’t tell the truth if he was getting overwhelmed. “How is Skippy doing?”
“I told you, I can speak for myself, Joe,” the tremble was replaced by a tone of annoyance, I counted that as an improvement.
“Skippy is fine, Joseph,” Nagatha reported.
“Ah, good.” That made me feel better.
“To be clear,” she made a throat-clearing sound, “when I said ‘fine’ I meant it in the way you humans say ‘fine’ when you are in fact not fine, but you do not wish to admit it.”
“Hey!” Skippy protested.
“Skippy is significantly fatigued,” Nagatha ignored the beer can’s attempt to interrupt. “Considering the vital and extremely delicate nature of the next phase of this operation, I recommend that Skippy rest. You and your team should rest also, Joseph. The past two days have been especially hard on you, I have noticed you were not sleeping well.”
“I haven’t been sleeping much, but I also haven’t been doing much of anything,” it was my turn to protest.
“Yes, Dear, you have been doing something that is very stressful; you have been worrying. I have observed that worrying drains your energy. If I may, I suggest that Skippy, and you and the others going on the away mission rest for eight hours before departure.”
That made me groan inside which I kept to myself, except I am sure she monitored my vital signs and saw my blood pressure spike or drop or whatever it does in that situation. “Listen, Nagatha, I appreciate your concern and that would be a great idea if we had more time-”
“Joseph,” she said gently, “I only mentioned it because the upcoming operation is of vital importance to the survival of your entire species, and the operation is extremely delicate which requires Skippy and the away team to be as sharp as you can be.”
Crap, she was right. She was absolutely, one hundred percent right. To my surprise, Skippy agreed. “Joe,” he sighed, “though I am reluctant to say this, Nagatha is correct. You meatsacks should rest before going into action. I also, and this is not easy to say, could use some downtime. My processors do not require sleep, however the recent continuous strain on my matrix has made me realize there are adjustments needed to the redesign I implemented after I rebooted myself. Yes, I am the new, improved even-more-awesome Skippy, however even I can benefit from minor tweaks to my internal structure. While I was concentrating extremely hard to get the six packages down into to that cavern, I was not able to perform running maintenance on my internal indexing and- Doing what you think of as rearranging my sock drawers.”
“Ah, I got it. Your matrix is not all neat and tidy the way you like it.”
“Whether I like it does not matter, Joe. What does matter is that my processing speed and flexibility is decreased by the degraded condition of my matrix. Bottom line is, I should take myself partially offline for a while, to be safe. On the moonbase mission, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong, and still we were successful. The mission to acquire pixies is an order of magnitude more difficult and delicate. In this mission, absolutely every part of the plan could go exactly right and we could still fail, because there are too many unknowns. There is zero margin for error on this one, Joe.”
“Uh huh.” I stifled a yawn, “got it. Ok, I do not like another delay, time is running out for us to learn where those ships are going, they might already be on their way to Earth. To give us the best chance for success, we will stand down for,” I thought about what to say. The small away team was tired and we could use a solid eight hours of sleep. Add time before and after. “Fourteen hours, is that good?”
“That is good, Joe,” Skippy’s own voice contained a hint of a yawn, he was doing that for my benefit.
Smythe, Grudzien and Reed did not like hearing about the delay, they all wanted to go and get it over with and they were all keyed up to launch their phase of the mission on schedule. They also understood when I explained the reasons, and Smythe set an example by going straight to his cabin to maximize sleep time. We planned to meet at the dropship in twelve hours, giving us two hours to preflight the bird and triple-check everything before launching our ultra-risky mission.
“This is crazy this is crazy this is crazy,” Skippy’s avatar muttered to himself while helpfully standing atop the console between pilot seats, swinging his arms in front of him and bending his legs, like he was working up the nerve to jump into a swimming pool.
“You are not boosting our confidence here, Skippy,” I shot him a worried look. “Is this going to work or not?”
“The theory is sound,” he was instantly defensive.
“That’s not what you said when I explained what I wanted to do.”
“That is because you had no idea what you were asking. Only my incredible magnificence makes your lunatic scheme possible. If it is possible. I would feel a lot better if we had been able to fully test this scheme.”
“You told me we don’t have enough equipment for a full test.”
“Well, we don’t. If we strip any more parts off the Dutchman, we might as well park it, because it won’t be going anywhere.” His avatar turned to look at the cockpit displays. “It sure is dark out there. This is creepy.”
Our very-much-modified Dragon dropship was hovering in a chamber we had carved and melted under the surface of a nameless small comet, way out in the Oort cloud of the star system where the pixie factory was located. Just getting the Dragon down into the chamber had been a major project. All the extra gear attached made it too big to comfortably fit through the docking bay door, and we couldn’t afford to risk damaging the gear that could not be replaced, so we had flown the Dragon out the door, where a crew bolted on all the extra gear. Then we left our stealthed starship behind, to engage the Dragon’s own enhanced stealth field and fly down into a narrow tunnel that led to the chamber. The comet rotated very slowly, so the tunnel entrance would be facing away from the inner star system for another eighty seven days. That tunnel had so many twists and turns that even if the entrance had been directly facing the distant star, no light would have been detected in the cavern where the Dragon was hiding.
The tricky part of using a comet to conceal our highly-modified dropship was that the Dutchman first had to take nearly a week to slowly and steadily nudge the comet until it was traveling in the exact direction we needed and at the exact speed. The comet was now moving on a vector very different from most other objects in the local Oort Cloud and the Maxolhx would eventually notice that, but because the comet was a small, dirty chunk of ice, no one was paying close attention to it.
“Sir,” Reed got my attention from the pilot seat. Even in the low gravity of the comet, our little Dragon, burdened by all the heavy equipment bolted onto it, could not hover forever without running the fuel supply dangerously low.
“Uh, yeah, thank you,” I acknowledged her concern. “Skippy, is there any reason we can’t go on schedule?”
“Oh, so, so many reasons, Joe,” the avatar shook its head slowly. “Sanity, for one. Then there is-”
“Yeah, blah blah blah,” I waved a hand, irritated at him. “We are doing this. Will waiting increase our cha
nce of success?”
“Nothing could increase your chance of success,” he sniffed, and I noticed he said ‘your’ instead of ‘our’. The traitorous little shithead was already emotionally distancing himself from us, partly so he wouldn’t share any of the blame if the mission went sideways.
“Fine, then. Everything is programmed into the autopilot?” Rather than pointing to the walnut-sized navigation computer built into the flight console between the pilot seats, I jerked a thumb backwards to the pile of hardware jammed into the cabin, forcing Smythe and Grudzien to occupy jump seats attached to the rear of the cockpit bulkhead. Through yet another microwormhole, this one’s near end was in a canister strapped to the back of my seat, Skippy had instantaneous communications between our Dragon and the Dutchman that was parked only fifty thousand kilometers away, for safety in case the experiment failed and the resulting explosion cracked the little comet. The speed-of-light time lag across even a mere fifty thousand klicks was too much for Skippy to control the experiment, so he grudgingly consented to create yet another tiny wormhole for us.
“Everything is programmed that can be programmed ahead of time, I told you that. You really want to do this?”
I looked at the sour expression on Reed’s face, then back to Smythe and Grudzien. None of us were enthusiastic about trying our latest whacky stunt. “I really do not, Skippy,” I met Reed’s eyeroll with a shrug. “None of us want to be here. We’re doing it anyway. Initiate on schedule, please.”
“Okey-dokey, it’s your funeral,” he grumbled. “This is all going to happen faster than monkeys can think, so shut up and let me work.”
The first thing that happened, which I only know about from sensor data afterward, was a jumble of jump drive coils and capacitors attached to the outside of our Dragon created a jump wormhole, projecting the far end across the star system and into the cavern Skippy had dug out under the pixie factory on the planet Detroit. That jump wormhole survived only a quarter of a second, and was not more than half a millimeter in diameter at the event horizon. As Skippy said, things happened fast, so a quarter-second was plenty of time to either get the job done or create a disaster that could blow away the comet and force the Dutchman to perform an emergency jump away.
With the jump wormhole open and verified as momentarily stable, Skippy analyzed sensor data and sent updated instructions to the autopilot that was really a jump computer. Even with Skippy’s instantaneous communication through the magic of microwormholes, he could not control our jump, and once the Dragon began to be pulled into the second jump wormhole, his connection to us would be cut off. We needed the crude assembly of mismatched alien circuits stolen from the Roach Motel’s junkyard to control the jump for us, and I am sure the thing was talking to itself something like ‘What the F- you have GOT to be kidding me!’ when it realized it was supposed to guide us to jump through another wormhole.
My genius idea, which started as more of a concept, Ok, more of a daydream than an actual idea, was for us to gain access to the pixie factory by jumping a dropship close enough that we could walk to the factory complex. I had been inspired by that book about teleporting dragons, because we would basically be teleporting a dropship. Skippy had convinced me, after endless and futile argument, that there was absolutely no way something the size of a dropship, not even something the size of a human encased in a spacesuit and stealth field, could approach the planet without being detected. The Maxolhx sensor grids around the moon were much too sophisticated, not even Skippy could manipulate them enough to slip us through.
I got the idea by thinking about how, shortly after we capture the Flying Dutchman, we got rid of more than a dozen unwanted Kristang starships, by having Skippy take control and jump them into a gas giant planet. Yes, sure, those ships had been destroyed from emerging deep down in the gravity well, inside a thick atmosphere, and from their jump wormholes being close enough to overlap and destabilize. What I had proposed to Skippy was that somehow, his incredible magnificence could control a jump so a small dropship could survive the journey.
Unfortunately, my understanding of jump physics had been woefully, hilariously wrong. Or, the cartoons Skippy used to explain jump physics to me had been wrong. Whatever. Although ships going through jump wormholes go from one location in spacetime to another location without traveling all the space in between, the two ends of a jump wormhole itself do have a tenuous connection through the space between them. Technically, that is not true, but when one end of a wormhole is inside a planet, the mass of the planet between it and the other end does warp and distort and try to tear apart the wormhole. Skippy’s boundless magnificence could keep such a wormhole from collapsing long enough for something to travel through, but whatever made the transition would itself be crushed and torn apart by the severe distortion. So, the gleeful answer from the beer can was that this time, an idea I proposed would not work, and he could look forward to endlessly mocking me. Except, of course, that failing to get a batch of pixies would soon lead to the demise of me and all other humans, which threw Skippy into a deep depression. Not because my species would become extinct, but because he would not have a species as dumb as humans to screw with.
You might think his lack of concern for humanity’s survival prospects was a bad thing, but his selfish desire to continue screwing with us hairless apes was a great motivator, so I didn’t waste time yelling at him for being an inconsiderate asshole. On his own, Skippy realized there was a way to make my crazy idea work, and that the problem with my idea was that it simply was not crazy enough.
A jump wormhole emerging in the gravity well of a planet would be so severely distorted that nothing physical could survive passing through it, but that was not an obstacle to Skippy-The-Even-More-Magnificent-Than-He-Imagined. He was inspired by our jumping through an Elder wormhole during the Zero Hour mission. Sure, that stunt had broken an ancient wormhole, nearly destroyed the ship and thrown us into the future, but that experience yielded two benefits. First, Skippy had created a new branch of mulitudinous- No, that’s not it. Multi-dimensional trans- Nope, I still got it wrong. Anyway, it was some super-duper fancy type of math that nearly made even his ginormous brain explode when he ran the calculations. After that fateful jump, he had been able to refine his math and simplify it so even a comparatively stupid jump drive navigation AI could run the calculations, even though the poor device had no prayer of understanding what it was doing.
The second benefit of us using an Elder wormhole for an experiment was he had discovered something his math had hinted at, but he hadn’t been able to confirm until we actually did it. When one wormhole goes through another wormhole, that inner wormhole can be extremely skinny, like barely eight angstroms in width. An angstrom is a very small thing, I had to look it up and I still don’t understand it, but take my word that it is super-duper small. Think about this; two hydrogen atoms will fit inside an angstrom.
Why did we care about this newly-discovered fact? Because it meant our inner jump wormhole could be compressed to fit through stable pathways inside the first wormhole, the one that was distorted by passing through the mass of the planet. Or, that is what Skippy thought could happen, except he wasn’t a hundred percent sure because it had never been done before. We would have liked to try it in another solar system far from anyone’s notice, but we did not have any jump drive coils or capacitors to spare, and Skippy estimated the jump navigation computer he slapped together with duct tape and a prayer would not be good for more than two jump attempts before it burned out.
Also, the timing was very tricky, because the cavern under the factory was moving as the planet moved around the star and rotated around its access. We had to jump at the exact moment when our Dragon was motionless compared to the cavern, or we would emerge from the jump wormhole’s event horizon to smack hard into the cavern walls.
So, once again we had to grit our teeth and trust the awesomeness.
The second wormhole pulled us through the first one, with the
Dragon emerging inside the cavern Skippy created. Both wormholes collapsed immediately and the stealth field dampening effect barely contained the gamma radiation. “Whew, that was close,” Skippy gasped a moment later, speaking to us through one of the microwormholes that were parked just outside the cavern. “Wait a minute, don’t do anything,” he implored. “Ok, Ok, wormhole One was overstressed by the stealth field containing that much radiation, I had to bring backup wormhole Four online to take over the stealth projection, and I shut down One.”
“But everything is fine, Skippy?” I asked with my heart in my throat while I gestured for Reed to set the Dragon down very gently and kill the engines.
“Um, yeah, heh heh,” he laughed nervously. “Why would anything be wrong?” His voice ended in a squeak.
I braced myself for the fatally bad news. “What happened?”
“You are alive, aren’t you? Be grateful, Joe,” he sniffed.
“We were alive before we trusted ourselves to your idiotic math. If all we wanted was to be alive, we wouldn’t have done this. Did it work? Do the Maxolhx know we are here?”
“The good news is those rotten kitties, and their sensor network, have no idea you just snuck in through the back door. I guess there is more good news; I now have enough data to refine my calculations, so your outbound jump should not be as risky. If, you know, there is an outbound jump, heh heh.”
Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7) Page 37
