Hunting Dog

by Andrew Beery

It was an impressive light show. If the Defilers were concerned that there was no return fire, they did not allow it to dampen their enthusiasm when it came to firing at what they thought was the Gilboa II.

  In what I had initially thought was a stroke of good luck, the dreadnaught also entered orbit.

  Rather than join in the fire-fight, it began an intensive sensor sweep of both the planet and the moon we were hiding on. By sitting quietly and cloaked in the middle of a debris field I was hoping that sensor sweeps would be fooled into thinking any leakage from our cloak was just more wreckage from the three hundred or so ships that had made Calisto their final resting place.

  It seemed to work… at first.

  A lucky shot from one of the attacking ships managed to nail Probe-1. The resulting explosion was especially underwhelming. A three-ton probe just doesn’t make as satisfying a boom as a giga-ton starship. I think my guests were disappointed. They immediately began looking for the real Gilboa II.

  It wasn’t long before the dreadnaught spotted our second decoy. The decoy was programmed to head deeper into the Jovian atmosphere when it detected a sensor lock. The dreadnaught responded by moving closer to the massive planet. They had taken the bait. Unfortunately, the fish we had just caught was a bit bigger than the one I was expecting or hoping for.

  “Mister Jowls, fire when ready. Let’s see how well they stand up to Jupiter’s gravity well.”

  “Firing now Admiral,” the Roharian acknowledged.

  From our position on Calisto’s surface, a gravity beam stabbed at the massive Defiler dreadnaught. Her shields were not designed to filter an artificial Higgs field. The result was a huge increase in the ships effective mass.

  This was the same type of weapon we had used before to wreak a good third of the Defiler fleet. In a perfect universe, it would have worked here as well. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we don’t live in a perfect universe.

  The gravity of Jupiter began to pull the enemy’s ship deeper into the planet’s gravity well. The dreadnaught responded by firing its reverse thrusters. I should point out, Dreadnaughts have a lot of reverse thrust available to them. The big ship actually managed to halt its descent. This was a problem.

  “Mitty, get us closer. We can’t let that ship win this tug-of-war.”

  My reasoning was grounded in simple physics. The power of our artificial Higgs field declined in inverse proportion to the square of the distance between us and the guys we were shooting at. The closer I could get the Gilboa II to that Dreadnaught, the more effective our weapon would be, and the more difficult a time they would have resisting Jupiter’s relentless gravity.

  It wasn’t long before we began to notice the dreadnaught losing ground. We were several hundred kilometers above Calisto at this point. Normally I would have been concerned about being this close to a hostile with the type of firepower that dreadnaught had, but I was betting their hands were full trying to avoid the whole crushed beer can thing going on.

  “Admiral, their engines are going critical. I wouldn’t recommend being this close to them if their containment fields fail,” Mitty reported.

  “Understood. Helm, plot an escape vector but hold on engaging the sublights until I give the word.”

  My thinking was that the longer we could hold that ship down, the less likely they would be able to recover in time to escape. It was a balancing act between ourselves getting out of a potential blast zone and trapping the bad guys in a hole too deep to get out of.

  What I hadn’t counted on was joining them in the hole. Did I mention the universe is not a perfect place?

  Three things happened at once.

  First, the dreadnaught exploded sooner than I had anticipated. They had deliberately shut down their containment fields to use their own ship as a bomb.

  Second, eighty-six Defiler battleships, who had just entered weapons range began to fire on us at precisely the same moment the blast wave from the suicidal dreadnaught hit us.

  Third, my day got a whole lot worse.

  2100.1289.8819 Galactic Normalized Time

  The local presence of the Eshbaal cabal analyzed the situation. The Dreadnaught that held its local presence was doomed. With its demise, the massive entangled quantum communication link that allowed it to function in real-time between the Sol system and the homeworld would be lost. It would need to rely on a proxy AI and the smaller and slower FTL communication links.

  It was a non-optimal solution. The unfortunate situation could be salvaged, to at least a limited degree, by destroying Humanity’s single most powerful defender. The appropriate instructions were issued and acknowledged. It was time to end this. The Eshbaal cabal cut the power feeds to the primary antimatter containment fields.

  Chapter 10: Up a Dog Paddle without a Creek…

  Smoke filled the bridge. Power conduits and their associated couplings exploded like fireworks at a massive Fourth of July celebration.

  “Status?” I barked.

  “Engines are down!” Shelby shouted from her station. The din of the emergency klaxons was deafening. “Aft stabilizers are also gone. Compensating with forward attitude control thrusters.”

  Shelby paused for a moment to verify something she was seeing on her control panel. When she looked up again, her face was grim.

  “Sir, we are being pulled into Jupiter’s gravity well…”

  I turned towards the Archon sitting at the engineering station. “Mitty, tell me we have shields.”

  “Hull integrity at 92 percent and climbing,” Mitty reported. “Shields were temporarily overloaded, but they are regenerating now.”

  “Somebody kill that damn alarm,” I shouted.

  I hit my comm-link and signaled for engineering.

  “Whiskers, we took a hell of a wallop. How long before we have our sublights back?”

  “Aye, Admiral. `Bout that. We’re in a wee pickle we are. Every last inductor coil was fused. We have plenty a power from the reactors but no way ta use it until we kin’a replace’m.”

  I had one of those bad feelings you sometimes get in the pit of your stomach. You know what I mean. It’s like when your brother feeds your dog hot spicy curry, and you know you’re going to have a mess to clean up when you get home.

  “Give me an estimate, engineer.”

  “A day. Maybe two.”

  You have to understand my thinking process here. Our engines were dead. We were in a decaying orbit around the biggest gas-giant in the Sol system. There were bad-guys aplenty shooting at us, and half the systems on the ship were fried. In short, we were up a proverbial creek without a paddle.

  “You say our power systems are still online. How are the shields?”

  “Aye, as I said, all our reactors are online and purring along like nut’n happened. The shields took a beat’n, but they have firmed back up. They’re at 96% and climbing. But Admiral, if you’re thinking they might keep us from being crushed like a can a soda… they won’t.”

  “You let me worry about that, Whiskers.”

  I had an idea. As ideas go, it was at best so-so… so I went with it.

  ***

  “Helm, rotate the ship. Fire attitude control thrusters as they come to bear on Calisto.”

  “Admiral,” Shelby said with a questioning tone. “That maneuverer will cause us to fall into Jupiter much faster than we might otherwise.”

  “Exactly,” I agreed with a hint of a twinkle in my eye. As I said, as ideas go, it was iffy… but boy it promised to be one hell of a ride.

  ***

  Our descent into the outer fringes of Jovian atmosphere took a scant ten minutes. The gravitational acceleration of Jupiter is about two and a half times that of Earth at just shy of twenty-six meters per second squared.

  From a practical point of view, that meant several things for your average starship without thrusters caught in the planet’s gravitational web.

  First, we built up speed, and therefore kinetic energy, very quickly. Second, that kinetic energy
would convert itself to heat very quickly as we tore through the outer edges of the Jovian atmosphere. Third, things would only get worse from there, very quickly, as the atmospheric pressure grew to many times the pressure of Earth’s deepest oceans… long before we got anywhere near the surface. This was the ‘crushed soda can’ scenario my good buddy Whiskers had alluded to earlier.

  Fortunately, with the proper care and planning, none of these dire and ignoble fates waited for the Gilboa II.

  “Shields are holding,” Shelby reported as we plunged deeper and deeper into the thick atmosphere.

  The ship lurched sharply.

  I raised an eyebrow and looked at my First Officer. She confirmed my suspicions. Our friends up above were dropping nukes on our heads. It was kind of like ancient submarine warfare where one side dropped depth charges on the other side.

  There was no chance the nukes were going to penetrate our shields, but I doubted that was their intent. The nukes created shock waves that drove the Gilboa II deeper into the dense atmosphere. The deeper we went, the more strain we placed on our shields and the stronger Jupiter’s pull on us would be.

  “How much longer will our shields hold?”

  Mitty sent the numbers over to Shelby’s station.

  “According to the pressure estimates, tidal eddies and our current rate of descent, we are looking at twenty-five to thirty minutes at the most,” Shelby answered.

  At about the same time, the turbolift door opened and Whiskers stepped onto the bridge.

  “Report, Engineer.”

  “The J’ni are working their magic, but it will be a wee bit before we have a good idea where we stand. The construction bots are attempting ta reconfigure the shield nodes on the hull as we speak.”

  Whiskers McGraw and I had been friends for a long time. I knew many of his tells. I noticed Whiskers’ characteristic accent was almost missing. This usually meant he was concerned enough about something that he was being very intentional about being understood.

  “You’re concerned about something. Out with it.”

  “Ya mean aside from falling to our deaths while blokes who want nut’n more than to kill us are dropping nukes on our heads?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s dim bots trying to reconfigure the shields. We are running out of them.”

  “Explain,” I said.

  “The wee buggers are last’n no more than a couple a minutes while they’re exposed to the elements.”

  “…And we can’t fabricate replacements for the ones we lose?”

  “Aye, we can, but normally we have materials from the old unit ta utilize in building the new one. When we lose one of these… it’s just gone. We don’a have enough raw materials to fix the ship… much less replace the bots.”

  I nodded in understanding. Resources were always a constraint in battle. This one was no exception.

  “Do we have enough modified nodes to expand the shield radius?”

  “Aye, at the moment we can handle about seven maybe seven and a half mega-bars. Much more than that, and you’ll start draining the shields faster than we can regenerate them.”

  “Understood. Hold a few of the bots in reserve. Put as many enhanced emitter nodes in place as you can and then reprioritize the engines.”

  I turned back to Mitty.

  “How’s our atmospheric current map coming?”

  “I have mapped seven distinct layers within the ascent/descent range of the ship. There is a heavily charged inversion layer approximately seventy kilometers below our current position. It should effectively hide us from their sensors.”

  “Very good. Helm as soon as we pass into that layer expand the shield radius until we are neutrally buoyant.”

  “Understood Admiral,” Lieutenant Daniels acknowledged.

  ***

  For the next few weeks, the Gilboa II used her shields to change her buoyancy… floating higher or lower in the turbulent Jovian atmosphere to change direction and speed by changing which eddies and currents we traveled in.

  The whole time we were playing this game, the bad guys were half-heartedly making an effort to ruin our day. It was hard to say if they thought we were already dead or if they knew we weren’t but didn’t know where we were.

  Whoever said that floating around in what was essentially a big balloon and seeing the sights of Jupiter was a great time… was nuts. To be fair, I doubt anybody had ever said that. Having spent the last serval weeks doing just that, I could understand why not.

  In many ways, I felt like an early nautical captain roaming the high seas… completely at the mercy of the wind and currents. As nostalgic as that was, it wasn’t the game I wanted to be playing right now.

  After several meetings with my engineering staff, we hit upon a potential solution. It wouldn’t help us in the vacuum of space, but it could be a game changer in Jupiter’s thick, hydrogen-rich atmosphere. I ordered Whiskers to start to make modifications to our railguns. Basically, we were going to create a magnetohydrodynamic drive.

  You may be asking what in the world a magnetohydrodynamic drive is. Sometimes they’re called Caterpillar Drives, but, to be honest, it’s a lousy name in my perspective. When I think about a caterpillar, I think about a worm with hair that inches along. This system was more like a Bussard Ramjet. Think ‘squirt gun with a never-ending supply of water.’

  The drive would pull hydrogen into a linear accelerator… our railguns, in this scenario. It would then excite the hydrogen to split the molecules apart, and finally, rapidly accelerate them out the backend using magnetic fields. The end result would be thrust using reaction mass from the environment. A pretty neat trick.

  Sadly, we needed time to reconfigure our railguns. This meant I was forced for the time being to move the ship using more conventional, albeit slower, means. For the record, I’m not a fan of slow.

  The only excitement came when the dozen or so Defilers still in orbit dropped nukes in our general vicinity. I assume this was done just to let us know they stilled cared. It was touching. It was also a good bet they couldn’t see exactly where we were, given the interference of the highly charged energy layer between us and them, but that didn’t stop them from making educated guesses based on sensor shadows.

  Who knew that evil clones, created for the sole purpose of subjugating humanity by a maniacal alien AI, could be so persistent?

  Our goal was not simply evasion. While the Defilers continued to actively scan the atmosphere of Jupiter, looking for any sign of us… we were actively scanning for much-needed resources. The bottom line was the launch of the Gilboa II had been rushed. The ship was essentially complete, but she was not fully stocked with provisions and raw materials for repairs.

  The good news was that Jupiter is a big planet and has plenty of anything the Gilboa II might need. The bad news was Jupiter is a big planet, and anything we might need was darn near impossible to get to.

  Our biggest need was one of the simplest to come by… normally. We needed steel. Iron and a little bit of carbon. Two incredibly abundant elements on a planet like Jupiter. The carbon was not a problem. We could harvest it from hydrocarbons swirling about in the Jovian atmosphere.

  Iron was another matter. For that, we needed to gather iron snow. Did I mention the weather on Jupiter was somewhat odd?

  When Mitty and Whiskers first suggested we could simply put out a net and catch iron falling from the upper atmosphere… I thought perhaps the CO2 scrubbers were failing again. It turns out they were on to something.

  Weather is driven by energy, which Jupiter has a lot of. The planet has only about one-tenth of one percent the mass of our sun… but it is still more than three hundred times the mass of the Earth, and two and a half times the mass of every other planet in the solar system combined. That means there is a lot of energy in the form of gravitational friction, magnetic fields, and the like.

  Jupiter has a massive magnetic field. Near the outer edges of the atmosphere, the magnetic fields whip the molec
ular hydrogen into an almost plasma state with temperatures near 1700 degrees Fahrenheit. As you head down the atmospheric column, the temperature falls precipitously until, at the Earth-normal pressure of one bar, the mean temperature is a chilly one hundred and seventy degrees below zero.

  Diving yet further into the atmospheric well sees the temperatures rise to a staggering 43000 degrees Fahrenheit near the core, which, for those of you that are interested, is hotter than the surface of the sun.

  Most of the planet’s mass is in the form of hydrogen and helium… but not all of it. It’s also made up of a number of heavier elements. This makes for the interesting bit. Normally, heavy elements like iron would fall towards the core and remain there in a molten state. However, the powerful magnetic fields near the poles eject a portion of the ferromagnetic iron out of the core and into the upper atmosphere. There it cools and falls like iron snow.

  Our plan was to maneuvered close to one of these poles and collect the iron as it settled out of the atmosphere. It was a simple plan. Hell, it was a good plan… until it wasn’t.

  The problem with our plan was that it relied of the Jovian equivalent of Mother Nature. On Jupiter, Mother Nature is not your friend.

  2100.1289.8825 Galactic Normalized Time

  Captain Robert Kimbridge was not a man who could sit still. Both the Admiral and Gilboa II were missing-in-action. It was clear the fight to save Earth was not going to be won in space. Not when Earth was outnumbered five hundred to one when it came to starships. The only answer would be to take the battle to the enemy… but that would require knowing where the enemy’s homeworld was. Robert Kimbridge had a plan for that.

  Chapter 11: Dog Fight…

  Smoke filled the bridge of the Gilboa II yet again. This was the third time in as many days. What made matters worse was the damage was self-inflicted. Without maneuvering thrusters, the Gilboa II had been using currents within the dense atmosphere to move about… rising and falling within the atmospheric column by manipulating its buoyancy.