Hunting Dog

by Andrew Beery

The problem with this mode of movement was twofold. First, movement was constrained by the available currents. Second, as I might have mentioned before, Jupiter is a very big planet.

  Maximum wind-speeds topped out at just shy of four hundred miles per hour. That was pretty fast by terrestrial standards, but with Jupiter’s circumference of almost three hundred thousand miles, it would take many months to ride those currents and eddies to one of the poles.

  One trick we tried was to take advantage of traveling lower in the gravity well… closer to the planet’s core. The currents were not quite as fast, but the distance we would need to travel was greatly reduced. The problem was the pressure variances involved were too chaotic, and our shields drained too quickly.

  Fortunately, there was another set of eddies we could hitch a ride on. By carefully manipulating the shields, the Gilboa II was able to magnetically couple and follow the magnetic force lines that circled the planet. These currents traveled at near relativistic speeds.

  In many ways, however, this was like riding a bull. It was easy to get on, but the dismount was fraught with its own problems. We were dealing with one of those now.

  “Reserve power to the shields!”

  “Admiral we have another plasma burst heading our way. If it’s as strong as the last one it will drain our shields dry,” Commander Robison yelled from the aft sensor station.

  My CAG was the most experienced flying-by-the-seat-of-the-pants pilot we had so, for the moment, he was man navigating our ship. To be sure, the man was certifiable, but he was one hell of a pilot. He had been avoiding the worst of the plasma storms for days, but even our CAG couldn’t avoid them all. The smoke on the bridge was the result of another near miss.

  A plasma surge had enveloped our shields and began to rapidly drain them. The Gilboa II responded by pushing as much power into the shields as she could. This included using secondary systems to route the energy.

  Many of these systems had taken a beating and were being held together with duct tape and a prayer. When they overloaded and failed, the effects would often cascade… resulting in a number of small fires and a whole lot of smoke.

  One of these times, a critical system was bound to be knocked out, and then we would be royally screwed… to use technical terminology.

  We had been riding this particular magnetic force line for the better part of a day. It was a big one. As it folded back towards the core, it superheated the atmosphere and generated the plasma storms that were our bane. The plasma wreaked havoc on our systems and also limited our options for disengaging the magnetic coupling between us and the Jovian field lines.

  It was this last piece that had me most worried. Think of a balloon stuck to a wall with a static charge. The Gilboa II was the balloon. Now imagine the wall was in a burning house that was itself falling into a deep ravine. Welcome to my world.

  “Lieutenant Heinz I think it might be time to use that last nuke. Blast us free, and let’s see if we can’t find a nice, quiet piece of atmosphere to lick our wounds.”

  “Aye aye, Admiral. Bombs away,” the Lieutenant acknowledged with a disturbing amount of glee in her voice.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like it when people have a passion for their work but cooking off a nuke right next to where you are sitting should be a cause for concern, not glee. I don’t know, call me old-fashioned.

  The bombs we were using (with yields of about five petajoules) were relatively small compared to what the Gilboa had in its arsenal. Still, it was enough to wipe out a large city.

  We were using the shockwave from the blast as well as the electromagnetic surge to disengage us from the magnetic field lines… Hopefully, before we got sucked down too far into the gravity well or fried by plasma streams traveling the same field lines.

  As our little friend did its thing and went boom, the Gilboa II was knocked free. Thankfully, we were finally in a place where we could use magnetic scoops to begin collecting raw materials for repairing our drive systems.

  We needed something on the order of forty-five thousand metric tons. That’s a lot of iron snow. Whiskers and Commander Sa’Mi had rigged a creative system using our rail-gun operating in reverse to harvest the snowfall. I was impressed to learn that the idea had been the J’ni’s. The little aliens were great maintenance engineers, but they didn’t typically innovate. I guess close association with us hairless apes was rubbing off on the little guys. I can’t say I was disappointed.

  We had harvested about a third of our goal when our luck ran out. Every so often we would float the Gilboa II higher and launch a reconnaissance fighter to take a quick look-see. This was how we knew a dozen or so of the Defilers were still in orbit.

  The odds of popping up under an enemy ship, given the size of Jupiter, was astronomically small. And yet that’s what happened. The bad guy spotted our fighter right away. Up until this point, our friends, and I use the term loosely, had no real confirmation that we were still in the game… vague sensor ghosts notwithstanding.

  All that changed now. An intense sensor-sweep soon followed. The Gilboa II was still in the process of slowly sinking back into the depths of the Jovian atmosphere. They lit us up like King Kong on the top of the Empire State building.

  To add to our woes, near the poles, our options for escape were greatly reduced. We couldn’t use the magnet field lines because they would take us up towards the bad guys. The currents and eddies in the lower atmosphere tended to swirl slowly around the poles. In short, they weren’t our way out either.

  I hit my comms.

  “Whiskers tell me you guys have made some progress with that Magnetohydrodynamic drive you’ve been working on.”

  “Aye Admiral. It’s ready ta go… more or less.”

  “I need more of the more and less of the less. What’s the holdup?”

  Suddenly it hit me. I knew what the problem was. Whiskers confirmed it a half a second later.

  “We canna use the MDD until we re-jigger it.”

  “You were using it to catch snow,” I said with a sigh.

  “Aye Admiral. It’ll take us ‘bout ten minutes to switch over. Canna ya keep us in one piece ‘til then?”

  “You get that drive back online. I’ll handle the rest.”

  Before I could even turn in my command chair, the Gilboa II got hit by three massive bombs. The lights flickered and stayed out. It seemed the Gilboa II’s AI was directing every last ounce of energy into the shields.

  There was a rumble that I could feel through the deck plating. Word of warning, that’s never a good sign. It seemed the bad guys had upgraded from conventional nukes to higher-yield antimatter bombs. Another explosion was enough to throw me sideways hard enough that I was afraid my restraining straps might have broken a rib. We weren’t going to be able to take much of this.

  “We have atmospheric intrusion on Q-deck. Emergency bulkheads are holding, but we just lost decks on either side due to the implosion,” Shelby reported and then paused.

  “Admiral, the lower decks are cut off from the rest of the ship,” she continued. I could hear in her voice that she feared the worst.

  Decks Q and P were living quarters. Deck R was recreational. We might have gotten lucky and dodged a bullet, but I seriously doubted it.

  “Get a SAR team on it,” I said in a calm voice. That calm voice in no way reflected how I was actually feeling. Our Search and Rescue teams were trained for these types of scenarios, but you hoped to never have to use them. Still, that training might save lives today.

  Our ship continued to take a bit of a pounding, but it felt like the depth charges that were being used against us were detonating further and further away.

  The only good news was that when the bad guys used their bigger bombs, they needed to wait a few minutes for the area to clear in order to get a good target-lock on us again. I planned to use that time to good advantage.

  “Structural integrity?” I barked at Mitty.

  “The decks in question are a write-off, but th
e primary and secondary keel supports are designed to remain in place even if the decks they support are damaged. In this case, they worked perfectly.”

  “Mister Robison, use the attitude control thrusters. Bring us about. I want you to fly us right next to those primary polar field lines. And Commander, when I say right next to… I mean without actually touching them. Am I clear?”

  “Close enough to caress but no touchy… Got it, Admiral,” my CAG said with a grin.

  I swiveled my command chair to look over at the weapons station. At the same time, I brought up a floating 3D-holographic display and marked several locations I was interested in.

  “Jowls, load up six low-yield nukes. On my mark, launch and detonate them at the same time at these coordinates.”

  I used my hand to flick the display to his station. He looked at them for a moment and then began making adjustments on his board.

  The targets I had specified were about twenty kilometers above our current position. Each detonation would take place roughly three kilometers from its nearest neighbor. The ionizing explosions would disrupt the local magnetic field lines and play absolute havoc with the Defiler sensors. They would have one other effect… one that I was counting on to save our collective butts.

  “Mitty, I’m going to need the Gilboa to get fancy with her shield deployment.”

  I explained what I wanted the ship to do. Basically, I needed the ship to extend its shields asymmetrically. In that configuration, they would act like a sail as the blast wave from our nukes hit us. If done right, the resulting asymmetrical force would squirt us sideways.

  The EM pulse and disrupted magnetic field lines would mask our movement. With any luck, Whiskers and his team would have the caterpillar drive back online before our make-do cloak dissipated.

  When I got a thumbs-up from everybody involved, I set things in motion.

  “Let’s make it happen, folks. Jowls, please consider the word to be given. Light’m up.”

  “Six missiles away, Admiral. Should be a pretty impressive sight,” the Roharian weapons officer acknowledged between a couple of disturbingly sloppy slurps.

  “Detonation in fifteen seconds,” Shelby confirmed. “Shock wave should hit our forward shields two point four seconds later.”

  I hit the ship-wide comms.

  “Brace for impact.”

  It seemed a silly warning given the pounding we had been taking, but if it prevented one twisted ankle or bruised shin, it was probably worth it.

  No sooner had the words left my mouth then the turbolift doors opened and my wife, Lori stepped onto the bridge.

  “Grab hold of something honey. We’re fix’n to rock the boat a little.”

  “And this is different than normal how?” she asked with a smirk as she grabbed the backrest to my command chair.

  Before I could respond in kind, the Gilboa II shook. Not as violently as under the Defiler ministrations, but violently enough. When you considered the sophistication and effectiveness of the Gilboa II’s inertial dampeners, you gained an appreciation for how powerful the blast wave must have been.

  As expected, we developed quite a bit of lateral velocity based on the pressure hitting our asymmetrical shielding.

  The ionized gasses near the polar magnetic field-lines disrupted the local magnetic field densities. The light show was, in a word, impressive. By the time it had finally begun to fade, Whiskers had our caterpillar drive online, and we were on the move.

  2100.1289.8826 Galactic Normalized Time

  Robert Kimbridge could see smoke on the horizon. It was curling up from what remained of an American city called Atlanta. The enemy had made the metropolis an example. Kimbridge was here, having arrived in a cloaked shuttlecraft to find some answers. The man that would provide those answers had ordered this attack.

  Chapter 12: Dancing Dog…

  Four hours later, Lori and I were having a light breakfast with several of the engineers. I needed to catch up on what was happening with the ship… especially the collapsed decks. At the same time, I knew everyone was dog tired and needed a few minutes downtime. It seemed a Danish pastry and a coffee might be just the answer.

  “I don’t think me neck will ever be the same,” Whiskers grumbled over his breakfast of synthetized scrambled eggs and the Gilboa II’s questionable version of Canadian bacon.

  Sa’Mi made his chittering noises and the VOX unit that he wore changed his words into English.

  “I find myself in complete agreement. I was just exiting the Jefferies tube at junction A9 when the first of the antimatter weapons was detonated. It was profoundly uncomfortable.”

  The voice was that of Marilyn Monroe. If you are asking yourselves why; just chalk it up to the vagaries of working with aliens and their peculiar sense of humor.

  Recently, the various J’ni had begun experimenting with different human voices. I think they were amused by the reactions they received from human members of the crew. I drew the line when they started to program their VOX’s to mimic actual people onboard the ship.

  Sa’Mi was a male of his species. As they had three genders, this might not have meant the same thing to us homo-sapiens as it did to them. Still, in my mind’s eye, I thought of the J’ni commander as a male. To hear Monroe’s sultry voice emanate from a five-foot badger-raccoon-like creature was peculiar, to say the least. Alien Raccoon-Badger-like creatures are not supposed to sound like Marilyn Monroe… it’s a rule that must be written in a book somewhere. Trust me on this.

  Unfazed, Whiskers continued his assessment of the situation.

  “Admiral, there’s simply no safe way to repair the damage while we’re this deep in the pressure well. We’ve started ta reinforce the bulkheads on either side a da crush zone.”

  “So that means the lower decks are cut off from the rest of the ship for the duration?” I asked. This would be a real problem because there were people on those decks, and I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of a portion of the crew isolated from the rest of the ship.

  “The J’ni may have a potential solution. It involves a wee bit’a risk, but I think those risks are manageable.”

  I turned towards the smaller engineer.

  Sa’Mi bit into something that looked like a cantaloupe-sized plum. It had a pungent odor that he seemed to enjoy. When he had licked his paws clean, he answered my silent question.

  “I believe we can create an access point by using the turbolift shaft. It will require coordination with the personnel in the lower sections while the work is being completed. Basically, repair-bots would install pressure hatches on either side of the collapsed decks. Finally, the crushed section of the turbolift would be removed and a sealed conduit constructed.”

  ***

  The next several days were spent traveling the Jovian atmospheric currents. If there was good news in getting our collective butts kicked, it was that by harvesting the materials from the scrapped decks, we now had plenty of raw material to complete our repairs.

  It was a good thing because our lives were about to get a lot tougher.

  “Admiral, I have multiple sensor contacts,” Ensign Kofi announced from her station.

  “On screen,” I ordered.

  Six poorly defined blips appeared on the holographic display. Five were generally in front and above us. The last was quite a bit closer and deeper into the gravity well of the planet. The nearer one was paralleling our course. The remaining five seemed to be climbing. The Gilboa II was much bigger than these objects, which I assumed were small reconnaissance crafts. That meant they likely saw us much sooner than we saw them. That could be a problem.

  “Weapons fire a barrage of killjoys into the middle of that upper cluster. Let’s shake them up a bit.”

  KillJoys were tactical nukes that produced very short but very powerful concussive blasts. It was a good bet that those smaller ships would have a much harder time dealing with shockwaves in the dense Jovian atmosphere than the Gilboa II.

  “Killjoys away,”
Jowls acknowledged.

  We watched as the missiles from the Gilboa II raced up the gravity well in pursuit of their prey. Shortly before passing the Defiler ships, they detonated. Three of the five ships simply disappeared. The pieces that remained were simply too small of our sensors to track in the thick pea soup of Jupiter’s lower atmosphere.

  The remaining two ships remained ballistic for a few more moments before they slowed and began to fall back… deeper into the giant planet’s gravity well. At some point, they would reach crush depth, and that would be the end of them.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that would mean the deaths of their crews but sadly, given the nature of our interactions with the enemy over the last several weeks especially, I couldn’t make myself care. This callousness was the most damning part of war. It was the thing that stayed with you long after the fighting was done. God willing, I would find my humanity again, but, in the meantime, I had a war to fight.

  “The last bogey is veering away,” Ensign Kofi reported.

  I sighed.

  “Jowls, can you target him at this distance with a KEW?”

  I was reluctant to use a concussion explosive this deep in the atmosphere. Too much energy would find itself washing back on us. Especially give how close this last ship was.

  In answer to my question, the deck of the Gilboa II shook gently as the massive linear accelerator that served as our caterpillar drive tossed a metal payload in the general direction of the enemy. When I say ‘general direction,’ we were actually tossing a canister of buck-shot over the enemy and letting gravity pull it back down.

  I don’t care how well armored your combat shuttle is… being hammered with hundreds of kiloton rocks while deep inside a gravity well surrounded atmospheric pressures high enough to liquefy hydrogen is going to do bad things for your structural integrity.

  “The enemy target has been destroyed,” Kofi confirmed a few moments later.

  I nodded, as much to myself as to the young officer. To be honest, I had been expecting something like this for days. Up until recently, the Defiler fleet had little more than a suspicion that the Gilboa II had survived the initial encounters, but with our little dust-up at the northern pole, they now knew that we were alive and kicking. No commander worth their salt would leave a potential opposing force behind their lines if they could avoid it.