“Will you shut up about me in the shower?” I shot a nervous glance to the new people in the CIC. “What does a soft and squishy shmaybe translate to as a percentage?”
“It’s hard to say, Joe, duh. If I could calculate the odds of success, or more likely the odds of failure, I would have given you the number, even though it would mean nothing to your tiny math-deficient brain.”
To make the plan work, I had to ask Skippy to again do the thing that had gotten us in the mess in the first place; screw with a wormhole. This time, he only needed to screw with it a little bit, hardly noticeable. His manipulation of the wormhole could not be noticed at all by the Maxolhx, or they would react and ruin the whole plan. He made a tiny tweak to the wormhole’s operation, so that it emerged in a very specific place and at a specific time. Stable Elder wormholes had some variability in their timing and location, to avoid causing damage to the underlying spacetime, and because of changes in their connections to the local network. We could not allow any squishiness in the event horizon location or timing, we needed those ships coming through that wormhole within one hundred twenty meters of the target zone. We also needed the ships to be moving in a particular, predictable direction. Skippy met the first requirement by directing the wormhole to emerge where he wanted, and since that point was within the wormhole’s normal radius of operation, the network complied without resistance. The second requirement was accomplished by moving the emergence point on the far side, and realigning its event horizon on a slightly different plane in relation to the disc of the Milky Way galaxy. The Maxolhx ships had to maneuver before approaching the event horizon, lining up perpendicular so they would be properly oriented when they went through. That gave them the direction we desired when they popped through the event horizon on our side, and their speed was limited to a range allowed by the wormholes themselves.
So, we had the target ships in a specific location, moving in a specific direction, and at a speed Skippy could predict within point nine kilometers per second. You might think my plan was to recycle the trick we used against the Thuranin surveyor ship at the end of our second mission. Like, we plant a cloud of stealthed missiles in front of the event horizon, and nail the ships as they came through. Unfortunately, that trick would not work against the Maxolhx ships, because the first ship through the wormhole would alert the other ship about the attack, and at best we would destroy only one ship. Also unfortunately, we could not do that, we weren’t capable of repeating that feat. Although we left the Roach Motel with plenty of missiles scrounged from the junkyard there, many of those missiles needed work to make them ready for combat, and that required Skippy’s bots to take parts off some missiles to make a smaller number flightworthy. To make the mini-missiles that carried the microwormholes down to the pixie factory, he had to use parts from the good missiles. Anyway, the bottom line is we did not have enough powerful ship-killer missiles aboard to cause serious damage to a Maxolhx warship, and certainly not to deal with two of those ships. Even if every missile we took from the junkyard was intact and flightworthy, our opponents were supremely powerful senior-species warships that could deflect the barrage, and the Maxolhx would have a good chance to detect our missiles before they could strike. Like any other ship, the Maxolhx craft suffered from being temporarily blind after transiting an Elder wormhole, a fact that we were counting on. However, because the Maxolhx had incredible technology that even Skippy grudgingly described as ‘not insultingly crappy’, their sensors reset much faster than most ships. Faster even than our own sensors, because the magic of Skippy could not work miracles with our primitive Thuranin sensor gear. The efficiency of Maxolhx sensors meant we could not count on relatively slow missiles to reach their prey before the enemy detected them and their proximity defenses blew them out of the sky. I had argued with Skippy about that point, until he reminded me of the glaringly obvious fact that Maxolhx standard procedure would not allow the second ship to come through the wormhole until the first ship’s sensors and shields were fully active. Damn it! Having to be certain of killing both ships made our task enormously more complicated.
Another idea we discarded, this time before Skippy had a chance to mock us, was to jump a pair of dropships on top of the targets, the same way we eliminated the single Maxolhx ship in the Roach Motel. We simply did not have enough jump coils to spare after our stunt at the pixie factory. If we stripped coils out of the Dutchman to outfit a single sacrificial dropship, our starship would not be able to jump again. The trick of making a non-starship, like an expendable dropship, jump took a lot of jump coils, a lot more than I expected. Skippy had explained the problem was something like a minimum number of coils were required to create the feedback resonance loop that tore a hole in spacetime, my eyes glazed over at that point and I don’t remember much of what he said. He did say we could use fewer coils if the dropship being jumped had a real drive control computer, which was another thing not possible with the sparse equipment aboard the Flying Dutchman.
Because we were desperate, I considered stripping all the jump coils out of the Flying Dutchman, to put them into suicide dropships. That would leave our weary old star carrier drifting dead in interstellar space forever, but it would accomplish our mission of killing the two target ships.
Unfortunately, Skippy had shot down that idea, because it wouldn’t work. The Maxolhx ship we killed in the Roach Motel had its jump drive shut down, because that crew had known any attempt to jump before they reached the boundary would cause the Guardians to attack. The two target ships we now wanted to destroy would have their jump drives active and warmed up for an immediate jump away in case of trouble, and that squashed any hope we could repeat the trick that had worked so well in the Roach Motel. Skippy explained that active jump drive coils create a subtle, local distortion bubble in spacetime even when they were not powered up enough to create a jump wormhole. That distortion bubble made it impossible for Skippy to drop a ship into the same spacetime occupied by the target ship, because the jump’s far endpoint would slide off the bubble.
Crap. That had been my best idea. Until I realized that the active jump drives of the two target ships represented not just a problem, they were an opportunity.
If your brain has blown a fuse trying to understand all the ways we could not destroy those two ships, welcome to the club. Our club meets the second Tuesday of the month in the basement of St Rose’s Church, which is kind of a pain because we have to move all the Bingo equipment, and they don’t let us drink. We’re thinking of meeting instead at- Ok, enough of that, time to be serious.
“Forget the math, Skippy. Are you ready to do your thing?”
“I was born ready, Joe. My concern is that we will only have one shot at this. If anything goes wrong and this cockamamie scheme fails, the Maxolhx will never allow themselves to be vulnerable in this fashion again. Plus, they will send a full battlegroup to smash your home planet so your Sun has a second asteroid belt.”
“Thank you so much for the vivid image, Skippy, that helped tremendously.”
“I suspect you are being sarcastic, Joe. No matter, if you are determined to go through with this ill-advised whacky stunt, everything is in place and I am as ready as I can be, considering nothing like this has ever been attempted before. Hey, if this does fail, at least you will have the comfort of surprising the hell out of the haughty Maxolhx. Before, you know, they turn their wrath on this ship and vaporize it.”
“This is not helping at-”
He interrupted me. “Three, two, one, wormhole is opening! Aaaaand, precisely when and where and with the exact alignment I specified. Please hold the applause, you may marvel at my extreme awesomeness later, right now I have work to do.”
The work Skippy needed to do right then was simply to wait. You know the expression ‘you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’? In this case, we could open the wormhole, but we could not control when the target ships went through. We knew the target ships would come through that
wormhole because that was listed on their flightplan, but we did not know exactly when they would be coming through. Because the wormhole’s event horizon hopped around and only stayed open in a particular location for less than half an hour, the target ships might be coming through where we were, or they might be coming through later, at another emergence point of the wormhole. That made our preparations for attack enormously more complicated, because we had to get everything set up and wait for the ships to arrive, then if the wormhole closed at that location, we had to immediately jump to the next emergence point and set up for the attack all over again. There was a delay when wormholes switched to another emergence point, and Skippy planned to stretch out that delay to its limit, but still we were pushing the ship’s jump capability to hop between emergence points so quickly. Skippy warned that after seven emergence points, the Dutchman would need to take its jump drive down for realignment, and during that process we would miss three emergence points. In case the target ships came through any of those three point while the Flying Dutchman was not flying, we had dropped off recorder drones at all three, our plan was to quickly pop in to see if those drones had detected the enemy coming through.
Another problem was that as the wormhole hopped around in its eternal figure-eight pattern, some of the emergence points were too far apart for the Dutchman to cross the distance before the event horizon opened at that location. We would encounter that problem at the fourteenth emergence point, so as a practical matter we only had ten chances to intercept and attack the target ships. After those ten opportunities, we had to bail on that wormhole and try again at the next wormhole along the enemy’s flightpath. The good news was that Skippy could screw with the closest wormhole, so we could go straight to the next wormhole and wait well ahead of the enemy ships, who would have to slowly jump all the way between wormholes. Yes, the solution to aliens discovering that something was screwy with Elder wormholes, was for us to screw with Elder wormholes. It’s kind of ironic, I know.
Another complication, which is great because I love complications, was that the third potential wormhole where we might intercept the target ships was part of a very active wormhole cluster near a major Thuranin military base, so we had to skip that opportunity. After that, there were only two more wormholes before the Maxolhx began their long, lonely trip to Earth. Their flightplan was vague after the ships went through that last wormhole, so we had to hit them before they went through it.
When we got the flightplan data well before those ships even left their home base, I had been thrilled that we had so much time to prepare. Then, because work expands to fill the time available, we had to take the ship offline for maintenance and visit an Elder site and get into a fight with an insane Elder AI and make wormholes act crazy to sell our cover story and then upload our cover story to a relay station. Then, we prepared our battlespace, and waited.
Waiting was the worst part. Waiting gives your mind time to go into dark places and thnk bad thoughts. “Hey, uh Skippy. This is, ha ha,” I laughed nervously, “kind of a funny question for you. When you put together that cover story report, you, uh, didn’t include any Easter eggs in it, did you?”
“No, why?”
“Oh, no reason, just-”
“Although it would have been good for you to mention that before I uploaded the fake report, you dumdum.”
“Yeah, I am a dumdum, we can all agree on that. No Easter eggs, huh? That’s good.”
“True. Well, unless you count the Maxolhx putting on Brony costumes and sneaking into a My Lil’ Pony convention while they were at Earth. I couldn’t resist that one.”
“What?”
“Joking, Joe, I was joking. Damn you are gullible. Now, shut up and wait while I scan for the enemy ships.”
We waited more, and waited, and waited, and the wormhole closed on its own with absolutely nothing happening. We all breathed a sigh of disappointment and relief, the relief part was because the ship was still in one piece and we were still alive. Then Skippy quickly packed up his toys, and we jumped to the next emergence point to do it all over again.
We did it again four more times, then at the fifth emergence point, Skippy sounded an alarm. “Ship coming through!” he announced even before sensors detected anything on our end. Skippy could tell by fluctuations in the event horizon that a ship was approaching the wormhole.
“Stay frosty, everyone,” I said a bit too loudly, proving that I was anything but frosty. Great way to lead by example, Bishop, I told myself.
“Contact!” Skippy was also getting excited. “It’s- Oh, crap, it’s just a Thuranin cruiser. Shit. Damn it, I feel like killing that ship just for disappointing me.”
“Leave it alone, Skippy,” I warned, not knowing whether he was serious.
“Yeah, yeah, the last thing I’m doing at this point is to endanger the mission. Stupid little green pinheads.”
The Thuranin cruiser came through, sent an All Clear signal back, and two heavily-laden star carriers followed. Seeing those star carriers reminded me how long, spindly and massive the Flying Dutchman had been way back when we captured it, and before we broke it several times. I felt an unexpected pang of guilt at having ruined the careful work of Thuranin ship designers and builders. If they could see what I had done with their once-proud star carrier, they would weep.
Then they would, you know, kill me and wipe out humanity, so I didn’t feel a whole lot of guilt for those little green MFers.
It was weird watching two Thuranin battlegroups hanging in space right under our noses. At any other time, I would have been paralyzed with fear at facing such a powerful armada. Right then, what I felt was not fear but disgust. I wanted those battlegroups to get moving and get the hell out of there so we could do our job. We could not attack the Maxolhx with the Thuranin present as witnesses, and my greatest fear was that those Thuranin had decided to boost their chances of winning a Client Species of the Year award by providing an escort for the Maxolhx. That would seriously fuck things up for us, enough that, as those star carriers drifted in space doing absolutely nothing, I changed my mind about wanting them to go away and instead I just wanted them to die die DIE.
Hey, my superhero alter ego is No Patience man, so it is understandable that waiting was not a core strength for me.
Anyway, the Thuranin sat around with their thumbs up their asses doing nothing until the wormhole closed and then they DID NOTHING for another TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES until they finally jumped away. By that point, we had missed our opportunity to jump to the next emergence point and I was seething with enough raw toxic hatred for the entire Thuranin species that a single look from me could have wiped them from existence. Even Skippy, clueless as he is, sensed my foul mood and he answered quietly without extraneous chit chat. “Skippy, what are our options?”
“Joe, we cannot jump to the next emergence point because the wormhole is already open there, and the Maxolhx could have come through already. We might jump in right on top of them and blow the whole operation.”
“Yeah, and if they did come through there, we will never know it,” I slammed a fist down on the armrest of the command chair. Again, I was not setting a good example, and I got some embarrassed glances from the CIC. Simms shot me a look and I took the hint. “All right, no problem. Nothing we can do about that, we stick to the plan,” I announced, trying to sound calm and confident. “Skip to the next emergence point, we can get there early, that is good news. Skippy, taking one jump off our schedule changes when we need to take the jump drive down for realignment?”
“Not really, Joe. The three emergence points we planned to skip during realignment are some of the least likely for the target ships to come through, because the event horizons on the other end are not located along the flightpath of those ships. They would more likely wait for a more convenient emergence point. We know those ships are not in a great hurry to get to Earth.”
“All right, fine, no problem,” I babbled. “Stick to the plan. Skippy, you have all
your toys packed away?”
“Affirmative.”
“Outstanding. Pilots, Nagatha, jump when ready.”
There was no joy at the next two emergence points, then we took the ship offline for adjustments to the jump drive coils. We got to the eleventh emergence point early, and waited fruitlessly. Same with the following two, then the wormhole’s pattern had emergence points too far apart for the Dutchman to follow. I ordered the ship to jump to check on the three drones, which also had detected nothing, and then Skippy used a gap in the wormhole’s pattern to connect us to the next wormhole along the flightpath of the target ships. We got there, we set up for the attack, and we waited.
Again.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
The second wormhole had a different pattern, and we got there so far ahead of time that Skippy and Nagatha got the jump coils aligned perfectly. We had four opportunities to attack the target ships, then the next five emergence points were too far away, then there were five more chances before we had to give up and move on. It was out of our control, all we could do was prepare the ground and wait and hope for our prey to present themselves. That waiting had my stomach in knots and it was not easy on the crew either.
“Something’s coming through,” Skippy announced, his voice drained of emotion.
In the command chair, where my butt had fallen asleep, I stifled a yawn and kept quiet, as there was nothing for me to do. Crap, this was probably another Thuranin ship, or more likely Bosphuraq because we were in their territory. If it were just a single Bosphuraq ship, I might ask Skippy to destroy it, just for practice. And mostly because I was bored and frustrated and felt like killing something that day.
Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7) Page 51
