Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

“Hold on,” I dug my zPhone out of a pocket. “I want you to say that again, while I record the video.”

  “Why?” She asked, giving me a stare reserved for creepy weirdos.

  “Because, if anyone ever thinks you like me, I will show them this evidence to prove you are trying to kill me.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Only Skippy and I knew the truth, that he had no idea if we could get a super-duty wormhole to connect outside the galaxy. I worried about that and kept my mouth shut, as we jumped toward our first objective: a Kristang data relay station. Because the United Nations insisted we be extra super-duper careful, we kept the Flying Dutchman four lighthours away from the station, and Skippy pinged it for info. The station responded that it was lonely, as no ships had stopped there within the past month. The nearby star system was solidly controlled by the Black Tree clan and well defended, so it was relatively unaffected by the civil war that was raging across Kristang society. During the first year of the civil war, that star system had a lot of traffic going in and out; warriors going off to fight, and damaged ships limping back for repairs. The station reported sadly that the recent combined offensive by the Thuranin and Bosphuraq had reduced the transport capacity available to the Kristang, and the next star carrier to visit was not scheduled for another three weeks.

  With that assurance, the Commissioners authorized me to jump the Dutchman within two lightminutes of the station, and Skippy ransacked its database. Not surprisingly, it had no info about whether there were any more Kristang starships hidden near Earth, it did not even know anything about the Ice-Cold Dagger to the Heart. Skippy loaded a virus into the station, a file that would be carried to other stations and nearby planets, where it would quietly search for hints of secret operations involving Earth. If the virus found any information we wanted, it would send a message back out, to propogate across the network of relay stations. Personally, he told me that the Dagger had very likely been alone. Earth was just not important enough for more than one clan to devote the resources to have a secret ship transported all the way there.

  Really, if the UN was serious about investigating whether there were more ships stuffed full of frozen lizards near Earth, we needed to hit Thuranin databases for info. The Thuranin would certainly know how many ships they had transported to Earth, and we would not have to rely on a virus digging into the secret records of every Kristang major clan and subclan. Digging into Thuranin records would be easy one-stop shopping for all our intel needs, but the UN considered screwing around with the Thuranin too risky, so we did it the hard way. No, the dumb way.

  Anyway, I had my orders, I carried them out to the best of my ability, and I kept my mouth shut.

  Continuing to follow orders, the ship next flew along the UN-approved course to the super-duty wormhole Skippy had selected, with the Stooges suspiciously watching every move I made. Reed made sure our pilots stuck to the approved course as much as we could, and we used isolated but existing wormhole connections to get there. This mission would not involve any screwing with Elder wormholes, other than making one or maybe a small group of them connect beyond the galaxy.

  “Well, gosh darn it,” Skippy announced, after making us wait for a whole freakin’ day at the site of the dormant super-duty wormhole.

  “Gosh darn it?” Desai inquired from the command chair. She was the duty officer, I had just come onto the bridge after breakfast, and was eating the last couple bites of a bagel. “Mister Skippy,” she looked back over her shoulder at me, and I held my hands up. This was her show, I wasn’t going to interfere. To demonstrate my intent, I walked over into the CIC. “What is the problem?” She asked.

  “Gosh darn it,” Skippy said in a nervous tone. “Wouldn’t you know it? There is an issue with bringing this wormhole back online. Wow. There is no way I could have foreseen this. Right, Joe? Heh, heh,” he added.

  Oh crap, I said to myself. Desai’s eyes were shooting daggers at me. She was not buying that lying little beer can’s line of bullshit. And she figured whatever he was lying about, it involved me.

  Which was true. In my defense, I had not informed Desai about Skippy’s deception because I didn’t want her implicated in our scheme. No, in Skippy’s scheme. I was only guilty after the fact. Luckily for me, the Commissioner in the CIC at the time was Hans Chotek, which is probably why Skippy had chosen that moment to announce the discovery that he totally could not have foreseen of course not.

  The look I got from Chotek was not disappointment and anger like Desai was giving me, it was- Amusement? Yeah, that’s it. He was amused, like he expected something like this, and was waiting to see what kind of game I was playing.

  In a way, that told me a lot about how our relationship had grown since we first were forced to work together. He had been expecting me to conceal the truth about something, and he trusted my judgment that it wasn’t anything that could endanger the mission.

  Maybe I needed to stop keeping him and Desai in the dark.

  “Well, gosh, you did warn us this might not be easy, Skippy,” I replied without looking at anyone in the bridge or CIC. Lying wasn’t my best skillset. “What is the problem?”

  “Well, duh, I told you, it’s-” He must have realized just then that I wasn’t supposed to know about the problem before now. “It’s just the usual, the Universe screwing with us, Joe,” he finished with a decently-believable sigh. “I’m sorry, this wormhole is not usable.”

  That was something I did not already know. I walked into the bridge compartment in a few steps, and stood beside the command chair. “Define ‘usable’, please.”

  “I can’t make it work. No amount of screwing with this stupid thing will get it to connect beyond more than eight thousand lightyears,” he explained with disgust. “What a piece of crap.”

  “Ok,” I carefully considered what to say next, assuming my words might be in the official transcript of a UN inquiry someday. “So, should we just go to the next super-duty wormhole on the list? You have told us about wormholes that connect farther than eight thousand lightyears.”

  “Yes,” he began slowly, growing irritated at me. “Those are long-range wormholes that have remained actively connected, or they become connected after a shift, because the network makes them connect. Here, I am dealing with a dormant wormhole, and trying to make it do something the network isn’t programmed for.”

  “Got it. So, this is the wrong wormhole, or the wrong type of wormhole?”

  “No. You don’t understand. This wormhole is capable of connecting far beyond eight thousand lightyears. The problem is, I can’t get it to do that.”

  He sounded not only genuinely upset, but also seriously upset. Whatever the issue was, he had not expected it. “To be clear, this wormhole won’t accept your instructions?” I asked. “Or is it a-”

  “It’s not a matter of my authority, Joe,” he snapped at me. “The problem is of course not with my incredible level of magnificence, it is with the lame-ass wormhole controller module we have. Apparently there are not only different types of wormholes, there are different levels of controller modules. The one we have is not capable of generating the level of power required to establish a connection farther than eight thousand lightyears.”

  “Whoa,” I looked at Desai, so hopefully she understood that at least this part was all news to me. “What do you mean, the controller lacks the power? I thought our beanstalk just sent a message through higher spacetime or something like that.”

  “It does, Joe,” he said, and everyone could hear his unspoken ‘duh’ directed at me. “The controller has to communicate with the wormholes on both ends in order to connect them.”

  “Oh, wow,” I gasped. “I never thought of that. Holy shit! You mean one of these controller things has to reach across over a hundred thousand lightyears, to contact a wormhole in a satellite galaxy?”

  “Well, yes, duh. How else did you think it works? I thought I explained that to you already.”

  “I would have remembered a
little detail like that, Skippy. Can’t your incredible magnificence just, uh, provide the power or reach or whatever this thing needs?”

  “It’s not just the amount of power, Joe,” he explained the way adults speak to children on Sesame Street. “I have the power, in fact I have too much power. I would blow up the controller module we have, if I tried to feed that level of power into it. The problem is that our controller doesn’t, ugh, how do I explain this to monkeys? It is like the controller we have is a torque wrench with a six-inch handle, and we need one with a handle that is three feet long. Before you ask, no, we can’t just slip a pipe over the handle to make it longer. Also before you ask, the other controller, that we have parked near the Gateway wormhole, is also not capable of getting this stupid-duty wormhole to connect beyond the galaxy.”

  “We can’t touch that backup controller anyway, we need it to make Gateway act crazy, at the proper time that matches the bullshit cover story we are selling to the Maxolhx. All right, what can we do?” Maybe, I realized, that was that wrong question. “Is there anything we can do to fix this?”

  “I think so. I am not one hundred percent certain, but now that I know there are different types of wormhole controllers, I am making sense of a bit of data I collected a while ago.”

  “So, what do we do next?”

  “Well, heh heh-”

  Desai said it before I could. “Oh shit.”

  We had not yet gone through a wormhole beyond the galaxy, and already I was having to referee arguments about who would be in the first away team to survey a potential beta site. The science team included egos to match their scientific and academic accomplishments, so it was no surprise to me that there would be competition, but it still annoyed me. I reminded the team that before we could discuss who was going on the away missions, we had to figure out where we needed to go. And before that, we had to learn what thing we had to get, to connect a super-duty wormhole all the way out to a dwarf galaxy.

  It was actually a relief to me when Skippy announced that we had to go on another wild-goose chase, before we could look at potential beta sites. When he told me there were different types of wormhole controller modules, I assumed we needed some kind of extra-powerful controller. This special controller would be gold-plated, or have a label like ‘Turbo’ or some other marketing gimmick like that.

  I was wrong about that.

  “Joe,” Skippy told me, “I have no freakin’ clue what a super controller looks like, or where to get one. A scavenger hunt would be a waste of time anyway. Because super-duty wormholes are rare, I suspect their controllers are equally rare.”

  “Ok, but the network must know what the damned thing looks like, right?” I asked, feeling like I should not have to explain that to a being as intelligent as he claimed to be. “Ask the network.”

  He was equally frustrated with me. “Ugh. You do not understand. The network did not specifically tell me that I need a super controller. All I know is that, when I tried to make our controller wake the thing up, the network gave me a warning like ‘Insufficient power to establish connection’. Therefore I concluded that, duh, I need a more powerful device.”

  “Which brings us back to needing to know what the stupid thing looks like, before we can go racing around the galaxy to find one!”

  “That would be a waste of time, Joe. Like I said, super controllers must be rare. That is good, actually.”

  “Uh, what is good, Skippy?”

  His voice changed to a terrible Germanic accent. “What is good? To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!”

  “Uh,” I shot a guilty look at Chotek, who was startled by what Skippy had said. “I am not Conan the Barbarian, so-”

  “You got that right,” Skippy muttered. “You are more like Conan the Librarian.”

  There were snickers of laughter around the CIC. “Could you stick to the subject, please? You just told us that the thing we need to get is impossible to find. How is a good thing?”

  “Because, duuuuuh, if in the future the Maxolhx or Rindhalu want to activate a super-duty wormhole to go wipe out the beta site, they won’t be able to. DUH!”

  “Shit. Ok, that ‘duh’ is on me. Good thinking.” My timing sucked, because by then the Three Stooges had joined Chotek in the CIC, and were engaged in a quiet but furious conversation while they were glaring at me. Chotek was being patient and calm and reasonable, and I could tell he really wanted to snap their necks. It was good seeing him having to deal with the wrath of bureaucrats.

  “You are welcome,” Skippy replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “How about you stop wasting my time with stupid questions, and I will explain what we need to do next?”

  Fortunately, I had seen the wisdom in shutting up, so I did.

  “It is simple, Joe. I think we don’t need to find a different type of wormhole controller, we just need to find a sort of power booster for the controller we have. Um, you should think of it as a range extender for a WiFi signal.”

  “Great,” I groaned. “I suppose we will have to go some scary place like the Roach Motel to get an Elder range extender?”

  “Nope. In fact, I have good news for you: we do not need an Elder device at all. The technology of a device that can feed power into higher dimensions is relatively crude. Even the Rindhalu possess such technology. We should be able to use one of their devices.”

  Chotek was giving me a warning look. He did not like the idea of stealing from the Rindhalu, any more than he liked the notion of flying back to the Roach Motel.

  “Oh, yeah,” I made sure Skippy could not mistake the sarcasm in my voice. “That is much better. All we have to do it break into a secure Rindhalu vault or something?”

  “Again, noooooo,” he used sarcasm right back at me. “I happen to know of a place, multiple places, where Rindhalu technology should be lying around just waiting to be picked up. All we have to do is fly to one of the Dead Worlds.”

  “One of the Dead Worlds? Why does that not sound like a swinging good time?”

  “Probably because you’re not one of the cool kids, Joe. Think of this as The Rave At The End Of The Universe.”

  “That actually does not help.”

  “Like I said,” he sniffed. “Not one of the cool kids.”

  The idea of going to a dead world did not appeal to me at all. The idea didn’t thrill the Stooges either, so much that they had been on the verge of ordering us back to Earth for consultations, before Chotek talked some sense into them. Their charter, the Stooges had insisted, did not include taking the ship into hazardous situations. The mission was supposed to be about safety for humanity, not flying around on reckless adventures.

  Chotek had replied, with the quiet and well-reasoned logic of an experienced diplomat, that their charter from the United Nations was to locate a beta site. The UN wanted a secure refuge for humanity, and the mission orders had given the four Commissioners broad authority to do whatever was needed to locate a beta site. Going back to Earth with their tails between their legs would only mean the UN would inevitably send the ship back out, with a group of Commissioners who were capable of getting the job done rather than covering their asses.

  Since the Stooges knew he was right, they reluctantly voted unanimously to authorize me to plan a mission to one of the Dead Worlds, to locate and acquire the technology we needed. I was authorized only to make plans, with the Commissioners reserving the decision whether to proceed or not. Our three new UN bureaucrats did not know what Hans Chotek had learned from experience; that projects even in the planning stage gathered momentum, and at some point became very difficult to stop.

  I was Ok with the notion of the Stooges learning a painful lesson.

  Most of the crew was hesitant about going to as place described as a ‘Dead World’. Except for Smythe, who of course relished the challenge. And the rest of his STAR team. And our pilots, who were furiously playing rock-paper-scissors for the opportunity to fly any po
tential away missions. By the way, apparently the British call the game paper-scissors-stone. Some people who had lost the first round, suggested moving on to the more complicated rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock version of the game, but they were quickly shouted down.

  Ok, so, really, the only crew members who very much did not like the possibility of a hazardous mission were me and Reed, because we would be stuck aboard the ship while the others had fun. I argued that I should go with the away teams, while Desai remained aboard the ship to, as I said it, ‘gain valuable experience in command’. That argument was dismissed. By her.

  The Commissioners, including Chotek, were also not thrilled about a potentially dangerous glitch in their dream of a simple and easy mission. The four of them, especially Chotek, should have known that nothing is ever simple or easy for the Merry Band of Pirates.

  First, I should explain that the Dead Worlds are planets formerly inhabited by the Rindhalu and Maxolhx, before the rotten kitties launched a sneak attack against the spiders way back when. The Maxolhx struck hard against critical spider facilities in the first wave, then the spiders hit back. Because both sides were using Elder weapons, the devastation to the impacted worlds was massive.

  Then, Sentinels detected that someone was using Elder weapons, and woke from their slumber to crush both sides. The majority of the Dead Worlds were rendered uninhabitable by Sentinels, rather than the two original combatants. In some cases, all the Sentinels did was make the already-radioactive rubble bounce around, but they stuck to their programming. The Sentinels were relentlessly thorough about hunting down and punishing the perpetrators on both sides, who had dared to use and misuse Elder technology.

  “These Dead Worlds,” I asked. “Can you give us more info about them?”

  “Certainly, Joe,” Skippy answered in a cheery fashion. “A complete package of data about the Dead Worlds is available, for three easy payments of only nineteen-ninety-five.”