Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “Contact!” Skippy shouted, his excitement back. “This is the real deal, Joe. Maxolhx ship just came through.”

  “Configuration matches?” I asked anxiously. We had to make damned certain that we attacked the correct two ships, the Maxolhx had a lot of them flying around.

  “Configuration is a match. I can’t confirm that is one of our targets until I see the second ship,” he replied in a whisper.

  Damn. I understood why he was whispering even in cold, silent deep space where no one could hear us. That Maxolhx ship, that powerful warship, was right there in front of us. In this case, right there meant four hundred thousand miles, but in space combat that was practically knife-fighting distance. My insides turned to water from sudden fear.

  Fear and anxiety, because we still had to wait. Damn it! The first ship got its shields and sensors back online after the disruption of passing through the wormhole, and it scanned the area with passive sensors. Those sensors did not detect our tightly-wrapped stealth field that Skippy was using seven percent of his processing capacity to control, and the Maxolhx did not bother with engaging their own stealth capability or conducting an active scan or even a thorough passive scan. Why should they? The Maxolhx were the apex species of the galaxy, technically one of two apex species but the Rindhalu were so old and lazy and inactive that the playing field was mostly open to the Maxolhx as long as they didn’t interfere too much with the spiders. Plus, the Maxolhx were in their clients’ territory, and their mission had the sanction of the Rindhalu. The defensive shields of the cruiser were active, making the ship invulnerable to nearly any threat from us. There was no reason for the crew or AI of that ship to be fearful, and their supreme arrogance was wrapped securely around them like a comforting blanket.

  A blanket that I hoped to wrap around their hateful necks and strangle them with.

  “Second ship coming through,” Skippy stated with a catch in his voice. This could be the culmination of our mission one way or another, or it could force us to wait again. Personally, I did not think I could take any more tension, I already felt like ralphing from the flock of butterflies doing a dance in my stomach. “Match. Positive match. These are the target ships.”

  “Is there,” I licked my dry lips, “any sign of a third ship?” If the two target ships had an escort, all our plans were for nothing. We could only tackle two warships, and Skippy gave us only an unenthusiastic shmaybe about our chances to even damage two ships. If there were more than two ships, we might as well go back to Earth and prepare for the end.

  “Negative,” Skippy’s voice shuddered with his own relief. “The two ships are not signaling a following ship. Joe, I have bad news; the position of the second ship is marginal for the attack.”

  What to do? Wait until we caught the ships again at a future wormhole and hope they just happened to be positioned more optimally? If we caught them again? No. “Screw it. We can’t risk losing these ships. Marginal is still within your envelope?”

  “Barely, Joe, and it is drifting to the edge right now.”

  “We go now,” I issued what might be the last command of my brief career. “Skippy, go!”

  To initiate our plan, we had to do something so crazy, so stupidly lunatic that only the Merry Band of Pirates would consider such a reckless action. The Flying Dutchman dropped stealth and broadcast a demand for the Maxolhx warships to surrender. As our demand blasted across the space between ships, we accelerated hard toward the target ships, in the process nearly burning out our normal-space propulsion system. We could only keep up that level of acceleration for three seconds after which the drive had to be shut down.

  Three seconds was more than we needed, or we were dead anyway. Our plan counted on the Maxolhx recognizing the Flying Dutchman as the mystery ship that had led them and the Thuranin on a merry chase across the stars, before jumping through and breaking an Elder wormhole. Though the aft end of the Dutchman was now a Frankenstein collection of bolted-together components from the Roach Motel’s junkyard, our ship was distinctive and no way could the Maxolhx miss seeing that we were the ship their government very much wanted to capture.

  Our lives and potential for mission success depended entirely on the sophisticated AIs in control of the target ships. If they were slow or confused and hesitated, or if they were aggressive and eager for glory by capturing us, we were dead and I needed to self-destruct the ship. We were counting on the two AIs to act like Skippy expected rational intelligences to act. Their ships were on a vital mission, they had suddenly and unexpectedly encountered a threat, and most importantly, the nature and capability of that threat was unknown. Unknown, but certainly powerful, because all they knew about us was that we had somehow manipulated and broken an Elder wormhole, something the Maxolhx could only dream about. Though they knew little about is, what they did know was that we had capabilities far beyond their technology, so messing with us without backup and more data was a very bad idea. To sell that notion, we demanded their surrender and burned hard straight toward them. Skippy assumed a rational AI would first seek to preserve its ship, its crew and itself by performing an emergency jump away just far enough to study our ship and assess the situation. A primary rule of space combat is, if you are facing an unknown threat, jump the hell out of there, you can always jump back in later.

  We had prepared the battle ground, we did what we could to sell the notion of our mystery ship being so powerful that we demanded two senior-species cruisers surrender, and everything else was beyond our control.

  The AIs of the two target ships fully assessed the situation a microsecond after the photons of our surrender signal reached them, and they acted.

  They jumped away.

  Or, those sumbitches tried to.

  The jump drive coils of the target ships, so much more capable and advanced compared to the mismatched collection of coils we picked up from the junkyard, still used the same basic jump technology in the same way. Their drives twisted spacetime and reality to open the kernel of an event horizon at the far end, and the event horizons expanded and began to pull the ships through.

  Except there was a problem the Maxolhx had not anticipated and could not control or detect. When we were in the Roach Motel, Skippy had warned me that jump wormholes opening too close together could overlap and interfere with each other, causing truly disastrous consequences. To Skippy, that was a good safety tip and he expected my monkey brain to say ‘avoid ever doing that’.

  Instead, my monkey brain said ‘hold my beer’.

  When I said we had prepared the battle ground, I meant Skippy had sown the area with microwormholes. He could only create, control and maintain a limited number of those magical tears in spacetime, his initial guess was that he could work with about ninety of them. Testing revealed he was limited to seventy eight, any more and his control began to fail and the microwormholested became unstable, emit detectable gamma radiation and collapsed. Because he needed some microwormholes to provide instantaneous sensor data between the battlespace and the Dutchman, he could only devote fifty four of them to the attack. With the battlespace being so large, we needed the enemy ships to be in a relatively small area so at least one of those paltry fifty four wormholes would overlap with the jump wormholes of each ship. The math was simple and unfavorable to us; we could devote only twenty seven of the microwormholes to each ship, and those ships were moving through a vast area of space. By ‘marginal’, he meant the second ship was almost too far from a microwormhole, that is why I told him to go immediately.

  The Maxolhx ship AIs, being rational and self-aware enough to be scared shitless about suddenly encountering a mystery ship that dared demand they surrender, engaged the jump drives they maintained on a hair-trigger at all times. Coils energized fully, spacetime twisted in the usual weird yet predictable fashion, and then-

  And then disaster struck. Skippy expanded the microwormholes closest to the two ships, overlapping their wildly resonating event horizons with those of the Maxolhx ship
s in an event that lasted less than three picoseconds. In the space occupied by the first ship, singularities merged and clashed, energies that were never supposed to enter our local spacetime burst forth into a universe that had physical laws incompatible with their place of origin, and the ship ceased to exist.

  Violently.

  Like, violently.

  There was not an explosion like fireworks or a nuke, the effects were mostly not visible and were highly localized, and there was not even much electromagnetic radiation because most of the energy got sucked into higher dimensions.

  The energy of the violence was in the form of a spacetime ripple, expanding outward at the local speed of light. When I said ‘highly localized’ I meant the effect was restricted to about two million miles, a mere dot compared to the Milky Way galaxy. Unfortunately, there were three things inside that two million mile bubble; an open Elder wormhole, the second Maxolhx cruiser, and the Flying Dutchman.

  The Elder wormhole, constructed by beings of unimaginable foresight and intelligence, warped itself to deflect and absorb the spacetime ripple, shutting down its event horizon early when the local network determined there was an unacceptably high potential for damage. The wormhole remained shut down only briefly, then emerged at the next point along its ancient route as if nothing had happened, impassively unconcerned about events in the lower dimensions of reality.

  The second Maxolhx ship, having timed its jump slightly behind its sister ship, survived because its jump wormhole had not formed enough to overlap Skippy’s microwormhole sabotage by the time disaster struck the second ship in the form of the spacetime ripple. Its jump wormhole collapsed, reactors were knocked offline, the ship suffered severe damage and all weapons and defensive systems were inoperable. It was thrown across space, no, the underlying space expanded along with the ship, and it was catapulted across the roiling vacuum.

  But it survived.

  Damn it.

  And the Flying Dutchman?

  We were farther from the epicenter, so that ninety nine point eight nine four percent of the ripple’s energy had dissipated by the time it reached us. The effect still caused our main reactor to shut down automatically, venting its plasma into space. Our jump drive coils became completely misaligned, our already-stressed normal-space propulsion was nearly torn from its mounts and all but three of the power conduits connected to it were ripped away. We were also swept up in the spacetime expansion, riding the ripple with the Maxolhx ship like two pieces of debris caught in a tsunami. The Dutchman tumbled out of control, sounds of alarms and shrieking composites bombarding my ears.

  When we stopped, my mind was reeling, from my head being thrown around and from the atoms of my brain cells having been through a spacetime ripple that had them jingling like bells. Blinking did not help; my eyes would not focus and my rattled brain was not capable of correctly processing an image. “What, erp,” I swallowed to keep myself from puking. “Sit- sitrep.” The main display was flickering, stabilizing. My eyes could not read the data. “Skippy! What is the ship’s status?”

  “Forget that, Joe!” Skippy’s voice had a seldom-heard high-pitched squeak of panic. “The second enemy ship survived! It is out of control and it is headed straight for us. We can’t get out of the way in time, impact in forty six seconds.”

  “Shit!” I was in a panic of my own, looking from one armrest of the command chair to the other. Where was that damned button? Did the Dutchman have such a button, or had I imagined it? “Uh, Skippy, sound collision alert. Crew, prepare for impact!”

  “Hey, dumdum,” my stupidity forced the beer can to drop his panic for the usual arrogant disdain, so I guess that was good. “The relative speed of the two ships is one hundred seventy eight thousand kilometers per hour. The crew will never feel the impact before it, you know, turns you monkeys briefly into plasma.”

  Crap, he was right. In Star Wars, spaceships collide slowly enough that you can see them crumple into each other and pieces break off to go spinning across the screen in dramatic fashion. In real space combat, things hit each other faster than the eye can see. Reality would suck for the purpose of a movie, because the action would happen in the blink of an eye and the audience would be like ‘WTF just happened’? In real space combat, some of the dangerous ‘things’ flying around are long, thin bolts of high-energy photons or charged particles that move at the speed of light, so poor primitive monkey brains would have no time to react. “Is there anything we can do?” Asking that was more like a prayer to the Almighty than an actual question to Skippy.

  “Nope. Not that I know of. The main drive is offline, most thruster control units are still rebooting and I’m not optimistic about getting them-”

  His tendency to wander off the subject was highly irritating, especially right then. “Do you have any good news for me?”

  “Well, hmm. Hey!” He was suddenly cheery. “The collision will clear the monkey smell out of what is left of the-”

  “Are you even trying to be helpful?”

  “Um, no, why? I told you, there is nothing I can do, and I am, um, I am overcome with grief at your impending and inevitable death. Yeah, that’s it. Grief is making me amuse myself at your expense.”

  “Asshole,” I gritted my teeth. Arguing with him wouldn’t accomplish anything. “Can we jump?”

  “Jump?” He screeched. “Attempting a jump right now would kill you more surely than-”

  “Not a full jump. When we captured the Dutchman, you used your magical powers to warp spacetime so the ship jumped off course, and the Thuranin couldn’t find us. Can you use the jump drive to warp space just a little, enough for us to avoid a collision?”

  “Well, shit. It would be great if you have these brainstorms quicker, Joe, your timing sucks. Ok, Ok, let me think. Um, shmaybe. The jump drive is totally dorked up, it won’t be much use. I suggest we vent air from the starboard side docking bays to-”

  “Don’t suggest, you idiot. Do it!”

  The ship shuddered as he blew open the docking bay doors on one side. “Done. That helped a little. Oooh, this is gonna be close. You monkeys should close your eyes.”

  Skippy later explained that he had to feed his own power into the jump capacitors, and when even that was taking too long, directly into the jump coils. Forcing unregulated and out-of-tune energy into the coils blew seven out of the ten he planned to use, and the resulting explosion destroyed two other coils before he could use them. That last coil made a feeble attempt to form a jump point before it, too was overwhelmed and cooked by the uncontrolled energies saturating that bank of coils. A feeble attempt was all Skippy needed to do what I asked, or to partly do a different thing inspired by but much more useful than my ignorant suggestion. Whatever. All I know is without me, the beer can would have done exactly nothing useful until that Maxolhx ship smacked into us. Once again the score was: monkey brains one, beer can zero.

  The ship didn’t jump through spacetime, it kind of sagged across it. A jump creates a rift in spacetime from one place to another, where the distance between two distant points is briefly zero. Not exactly zero, but that kind of physics makes my head hurt so let’s pretend the jump wormhole is zero-length. What Skippy’s attempted non-jump did was more like create a long dent in spacetime as the ship got dragged sideways, scraping across the underlying and invisible quantum fabric of the universe. If I ever get an ominous letter from the universe’s insurance company demanding reimbursement for damages, that would not surprise me. And if that happens, all I can say is get in line, asshole, a lot of people and lizards and other entities are pissed at me. Good luck collecting on that bill.

  All the efforts of Skippy the Magnificent, plus the sacrifice of ten jump coils, shifted the Dutchman only sixteen thousand kilometers, which was the ship’s length in local spacetime multiplied by some logarithmic thing Skippy tried to explain to me. It also weirdly skewed the ship’s kinetic energy so that after the non-jump that made my stomach do sickening flips, we were moving in almost
the opposite direction and three thousand kilometers per hour slower. That result surprised Skippy and forced him to reconsider the multi-dimensional physics of jumping.

  “It worked! We’re clear! We- Oops, now we might collide anyway because our momentum is carrying us the wrong way. Shit! Um, no, we’re good. Heh heh, had to double check my math there, coming out of that weird jump effect seriously messed with the navigation system.”

  To calm myself and to demonstrate my cool command of the situation, I tried to steeple my fingers together like one of the Star Trek captains, I forget which one. Trouble is, my hands were shaking so hard my fingers kept missing, so I folded one hand over the other in my lap. My conclusion was simple: I suck, and I should never be in charge of a starship. Or a rowboat. “Thank you once again, Skippy. We’re are not going to collide?”

  “Um, wait for it, waaaaaait for it- Yup! That ship just slid past us, we cleared it by a comfortable six thousand kilometers. Piece of cake. Although kind of razor-thin in terms of space combat.”

  “Excellent! We’re good, then?”

  “Yes. Unless, you know, you count the fact that ship is rapidly repairing itself and will likely have its weapon systems back online within four minutes. Um, maybe less.”

  “Four minutes?” It was my turn for my voice to shriek like a little girl. “What the hell can we do in four minutes? Missiles? Can we launch-”

  “We can launch, Joe, but the targeting system sensors are still resetting, those missiles don’t have any guidance to the target.”

  Crap! My mind raced through a slim list of possibilities. The only offensive weapons the poor old Flying Dutchman carried were missiles and a maser cannon. I did not have any confidence in the maser for ship-to-ship combat, and against a Maxolhx warship’s powerful shields it would be like pointing a flashlight at the enemy. Could we- “Wait. Hey, beer can, can’t you act as the targeting system for our missiles?”