Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “What?”

  “Hey, a brother has got to make a living here. I’ll throw in a set of steak knives.”

  “Thank you, no.”

  “You sure? These top-quality knives can slice through a hiking boot.”

  “Ah, if the steak I’m eating needs a knife like that, maybe I try something else.”

  “Probably a good idea,” he conceded.

  “How about I make one easy payment of zero, and I let you sing an extra song on the next karaoke night?”

  “Deal!” He shouted before I could come to my senses. “What do you want to know about the Dead Worlds?”

  “Let’s start with where are they?”

  He showed a star chart, on the main displays in the bridge and CIC. “Because the Maxolhx concentrated their initial attack on the critical inner worlds of the Rindhalu, and then the spiders retaliated against the closest Maxolhx star systems, the Dead Worlds are in a relatively compact area of the Norma Arm. You can see on the chart that-”

  “Wait. The, the ‘Norma’ Arm?” I chuckled, assuming he was bullshitting me. “Is that next to the ‘Jethro’ Arm?”

  “No,” he snapped after the laughter in the CIC died down. “You can look it up on Wikipedia if you like. The Norma Arm is also called the Cygnus Arm. Hey, I didn’t name the stupid thing, a bunch of monkeys did.”

  “Wow, sorry,” I made a slashing motion across my throat to dampen the remaining laughter. Displaying my ignorance did not make me look good in front of the Stooges. By the time we were having the tactical discussion of which Dead World to investigate, the Stooges had retreated to their extra-large cabins, to write reports for the purpose of covering their asses by blaming any future trouble on me and Chotek. They could be writing naughty limericks about me for all I cared, as long as they left the crew and me alone to do our freakin’ jobs. Studying the chart before I opened my big stupid mouth again, I was surprised to see the Dead Worlds zone was a tiny dot, about a quarter of the way around the galaxy’s disc from Earth, and much closer to the center. “That’s it?”

  “Joe, the star chart is currently showing most of the Milky Way galaxy, you dumdum. Watch this and be amazed.” He zoomed the view in, so it showed a span of about three thousand lightyears, according to the helpful little sign at the bottom.

  The star systems of the Dead Worlds were highlighted in red, and there were a lot of them. There was an ominous swath of red, in an arc that cut across the spiral arm that really was apparently named ‘Norma’. “Damn. That is a lot of dead star systems. Since we’re going to be looking for Rindhalu technology, can you highlight their Dead Worlds?”

  I had to guess, but it looked like more than half of the dead systems now glowed yellow rather than red. “Now I will highlight in blue the former Rindhalu worlds that are now in Maxolhx territory,” he announced.

  “Ok,” I looked at Desai, and she was just as bewildered as I was. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Because,” he explained. “We probably need to land on a former Rindhalu Dead World, and I would prefer not to sneak into a star system that is currently monitored by the spiders. Not only do you monkeys not need to make any more enemies than you already have, but also I do not wish to attempt to subvert a Rindhalu sensor network. Sneaking us through Maxolhx sensors is going to be difficult enough.”

  “Oh, got it. Hell, Skippy, do we even want to try doing that? I remember how tough it was to sneak into Detroit to raid that pixie factory.”

  “Trust me, Joe.” He snorted. “This is going to be a piece of cake, compared to Detroit.”

  “This is your idea of cake, Skippy?” I asked after I finished reading one of the books I had brought along, and couldn’t think of anything else to do. Being stuck aboard our Panther dropship, in empty space on the outskirts of a Dead World star system, resulted in my having nothing useful to do.

  “Yes, why?” he asked innocently.

  “If you are thinking of baking something for my birthday, don’t.”

  “Oh, shut up. What are you whining about?”

  “I am bored out of my freakin’ skull, that is what.”

  From the cockpit, Reed raised her hand. “Add me to that list, Sir.”

  “See? Even ‘Fireball’ Reed is sick of this.”

  Our other pilot, Wu, stifled a yawn. “I second that, Sir. This kinda sucks so far.”

  “Ugh. Joe, they are bored with being stuck here with you, not with this glorious and fascinating mission. We have successfully snuck into the edge of a Dead World star system, and are currently engaged in a clandestine operation to subvert a senior-species monitoring network. Around us are the burned and shattered remnants of a once-great civilization. How can you be bored?”

  “Gosh, well, let me think,” I mocked him. “First, I have been stuck in this Panther for six freakin’ days, with absolutely nothing to do. At least Reed and Wu occasionally get to move the Panther a couple meters in one direction or another-”

  “That really does not help much, Sir,” Reed groaned.

  “As for the remnants of a dead civilization,” I rolled my eyes, “all I’ve seen is a dark smudge. It could be dust on the freakin’ camera lens, for all I know.”

  “Well, excuuuuse me,” Skippy expressed his disgust. “That smudge is all we can get with passive sensors from here. If you like, I could deploy an active sensor sweep, or we could fly over there so little Joey can get a better view.”

  “How about we don’t do any stupid shit like that?”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want you to do the awesome thing we came out here for you to do.”

  “I’m trying, knucklehead.”

  “Try harder,” I suggested.

  “And faster,” Reed added.

  “Just try better,” was Wu’s helpful contribution.

  “Sure! Fine! I’m an idiot!” Skippy exploded. He was as frustrated as the three of us were. “You monkeys tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  The problem was, we monkeys had no suggestions for him. We were in the Kuiper Belt of a star system we called Slingshot, waiting for Skippy to hack into the Maxolhx sensor network that surrounded the star. The Flying Dutchman had jumped in way outside the system, with our jump signature tuned to look like a Maxolhx ship. Reed, Wu and I flew toward the star in the Panther with Skippy, and parked it in the exact spot he said we needed to be. Exact, like, within three centimeters of an imaginary line Skippy thought was the location of a tightbeam transmission path from one of the sensor satellites way out on the dark, icy edge of the system, and a network node on a space station in orbit only a couple of million miles from the star. I say he thought that was the location, because he was guessing at the location of the satellite and the space station. With all the satellites and the space stations were wrapped in sophisticated stealth fields, Skippy really was guessing that they even existed.

  So, we were trying to put our Panther exactly along an imaginary line, between two objects that might not exist. We also had to be there at the proper time, because the satellites and space stations communicated via burst transmissions that lasted no more than a few nanoseconds. As far as we knew, the satellite we targeted had sent its message inward a second before our Panther moved into position, and we could be waiting there in empty space for another month to intercept another signal.

  That was not going to happen, because despite all three of us being on our best behavior, Reed, Wu and I were starting to irritate each other. The other reason it wasn’t going to happen is I only had enough peanut butter and Fluff for seven more lunches. I should have had sufficient Fluff supply for twelve days, but someone had been stealing spoonfuls of delicious Fluff nutrition, despite both of our pilots claiming they couldn’t stand it. Based on the streak of sticky white Fluff in Reed’s hair, I had a prime suspect.

  After our minor blow-up, Skippy sulked for a couple hours, Reed took a nap and Wu and I ignored each other. No, that is not a nice way to say that. Wu and I gave each other s
pace. She chilled in a couch near the front of the cabin, while I sat in the copilot seat and ran a flight training program as quietly as possible.

  “Ooh! Ooh!” Skippy’s booming voice scared the hell out of all three of us. “Bingo!”

  “We picked up a transmission?” I asked eagerly as I killed the flight simulator program, and got out of the seat to make room for Reed, while Wu slid into the pilot couch.

  “Yes! Well, shmaybe.”

  “Maybe?” I looked over Wu’s shoulder to the pilot displays, they weren’t showing anything useful. “What does that mean?”

  “I picked up something that might be a transmission. Our sensors detected several atoms fluorescing, close to us.”

  “Wow. That is incredible, Skippy.”

  “Well,” he chuckled with false modesty. “It really was nothing, I just-”

  “I know it’s nothing, you little shithead,” I exploded at him. “Six days, and all we have to show for it is a couple of atoms doing some nerdy thing?! You can’t-”

  “Sir,” Reed interrupted gently. “This could be the break we’ve been waiting for. Skippy, are you able to establish a vector?”

  “Yes,” he sniffed. “We are very close to my original guesstimate, and I will tell you, after Joe apologizes for being such a poopyhead.”

  Instead of opening my big stupid mouth, I decided to be smart. “Reed, why do we care about a couple of sparkly atoms?”

  She pointed to the display in front of her. “Because they are in a precise line, Sir. We have seven, no, eight points of data. The sensor satellite sent a burst transmission to the control station. Now we know where both of them are.”

  “Oh. Sorry, Skippy, I am a big poopyhead.”

  “Because?” He asked expectantly.

  “Because I did not trust the awesomeness.”

  “Egg-zactly!” He snickered with satisfaction. “Will you ever learn, Joe?”

  “Apparently not. I don’t know if drawing a freakin’ line across eight points makes you a genius, Skippy.”

  “Sir,” Wu tapped her console to draw my attention. “It was pretty awesome. Skippy parked us within twelve meters of a direct line between two objects wrapped in Maxolhx stealth fields. Our sensors can’t actually detect either object, he had to predict where they would be.”

  “Oh. How did you do that, Skippy?” Although I was mildly curious about how he had done it, and I figured that knowledge might be useful in the future, mostly I asked the question so he could boast about his accomplishment. Boosting his massive ego was always a good idea.

  “Well, it should be obvious, Joe. But since you are an ignorant monkey, I will explain. Stealth fields bend photons around an object, so they do not reflect off the object. They can be very effective at hiding objects like ships, in the vacuum of space. Aircraft can also employ stealth, although an aircraft disturbs the air it is flying through, so stealth there is less effective,” he said in his droning professor voice. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at the prospect of him going on and on about nerdy details, but he was eager to get going, so he cut his lecture short. “However, Joe, most objects have mass, and that mass distorts spacetime around them. The sensor satellites, although they each only have a mass of thirty kilograms, create a tiny gravity well around them that alters the orbit of dust in the Kuiper Belt.”

  “So, you predicted the location of a stealthed satellite, based on how dust was drifting near it?”

  “Yes. I noticed that the trajectory of dust particles, in a very local area, was a few nanometers different from what it should be, based on the visible objects in the vicinity. Therefore, I concluded there must be an invisible mass creating a tiny gravity well in the area.”

  “Ok,” I conceded, “that does sound reasonably awesome. You had to use your math super-powers to do that?”

  “It is even more awesome than that, Sir,” Wu was practically bubbling with enthusiasm. “The Panther’s sensors aren’t actually sensitive enough to detect dust particles moving a few nanometers, unless we’re right on top of them. Skippy had to compare what our sensors were seeing, to what they should be seeing, if they were more capable. The really awesome part is, he predicted the location of this one particular satellite, while we were more than a million kilometers away.”

  “Well, gosh,” Skippy chuckled with false modesty. “I am blushing. Awesomeness is just what I do, you know?”

  “We truly appreciate it,” I put as much sincerity as possible into my words, while trying not to gag. “What’s next?”

  “What’s next is,” Reed answered. “We need to move the Panther to intercept the line between the satellite and control station. So, please strap in, Sir.”

  “We have to stay strapped in, right?” I asked as I eased my backside into a couch and the straps automatically wrapped around me. “We’ll need to use thrusters for station-keeping, or we will drift off the line.”

  “Very good, Joe,” Skippy sounded genuinely pleased with me. “However, you will not need to secure yourself, for the Panther can keep station with movements so gentle, you will never notice them. Also, we will not need to remain here for very long. The satellite will expect to receive an acknowledgment of its message within fourteen hours. When the control station does send a reply, instead of our stealth field bending the photons of that message around us as if we weren’t here, I will retune the field to completely absorb the energy. That way, the satellite will never receive the actual message. After I crack the encryption, I will use the authorization codes to send a virus to the satellite, one that will reprogram it to ignore our presence in this star system. That update will propagate from one satellite to the next within three days. The virus will also affect the operation of the control stations. Those stations might detect our presence independently of the satellites, but the stations will believe we are authorized to be here, and will not record our actions.”

  That sounded suspiciously optimistic to me. “Are you sure about that, Skippy? You told us we couldn’t slip through the sensor network around Detroit.”

  “Yes I am sure, dumdum. Ugh. I explained this already. Detroit was an ultra-secure facility, because the Maxolhx are worried about the Rindhalu obtaining the secrets of their pixie technology. There is no reason for the Rindhalu to come here, so the Maxolhx only need to be concerned with lesser species like the Thuranin, attempting to gain access to Rindhalu technology. There were such infiltration attempts many years ago, that the Maxolhx detected. The resulting punishment was harsh enough that no one has tried to approach one of the Dead Worlds in the past eighty thousand years. Because of that, the Maxolhx have become complacent, and allowed the sensor network here to gradually fade in priority for maintenance and updates. It is now obsolete, although still able to keep away the riff-raff.”

  “Yeah,” I had to laugh. “Except for riff-raff like a barrel full of filthy pirate monkeys. Ok, so, worst case is we are stuck here for another three days?”

  “Best case is three days, Joe,” Skippy warned me. “We can’t risk having the Dutchman jump in to retrieve us, until I am certain that the network here has been subverted.”

  “Oh, joy.” After the Dutchman picked us up, we could begin the dangerous part of the mission. “How about we use the next three days productively, and I review the progress you’ve made on your operas?”

  “Really?” He gasped. “You really want to do that?”

  The truth was, I wanted to listen to his horrible opera about as much as I wanted to remove all my teeth with a rusty screwdriver. But, the next three days were going to be insufferably dull anyway, and I figured it was best to embrace the suck and get it over with. I would take a bullet for the team, so the crew did not have to listen to him warbling scraps of opera and pestering them to praise him endlessly.

  It was not three days and fourteen hours before we sent a message to the Flying Dutchman to retrieve us. That would have been a mere eighty-six hours. Instead, it took one hundred and four freakin’ hours, before Skippy received mess
ages from every single one of the control stations, acknowledging that they would not be recording our presence. Damn, the distances in space are so vast, and light travels so freakin’ slowly, that everything takes way too long. The secret to my survival was a lot of day-dreaming, letting my mind wander while Skippy played one version after another of his operas. That’s right, he was working on more than one project. The Homefront opera, and a Broadway musical about penguins. Please, don’t ask.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Another secret to surviving those interminable hours was me randomly critiquing his operas, asking him ‘what about this’ or ‘what about that’? I did not actually care or have an opinion, and he was always insulted when I made a comment. Fortunately for me, his massive ego was so fragile that he always worried that maybe I was right, and he went away for hours to obsessively work on refining the music. If you could call it ‘music’.

  Anyway, mercifully the Dutchman appeared in a burst of gamma rays, and we were aboard within half an hour.

  The next part should have been relatively simple. Somewhat dangerous and crazy, but simple, compared to our previous challenge of hacking into an invisible senior-species sensor network. We should have immediately jumped to the Dead World we were calling ‘Slingshot’, to get the mission over with as quickly as possible, before a random Maxolhx ship jumped in to spoil the party. But, the Stooges wanted to consider the matter, and delay and argue and wring their hands about things they couldn’t control. You would think that, since we had covered the topic exhaustively during the flight to the Slingshot system, there would be nothing left to argue about. You would be wrong about that. Bureaucrats can always find a reason not to make a decision. Even Chotek, who had grown a spine during his service with the Merry Band of Pirates, was unsure about what to do. Skippy remotely hacking into a sensor network had been a risk, on a level the Commissioners were uncomfortable with but ultimately approved. The next step was a huge increase in risk; taking the Flying Dutchman into a burned-out star system that had once been home to the most powerful beings currently alive in the galaxy. The Commissioners were concerned that the Rindhalu might not have completely abandoned the world, that Skippy’s hacking effort had not fooled the Maxolhx sensor network, and that a starship from either species might randomly jump in to spoil the party.