Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “It was a threat. It just wasn’t an external threat. Attracting the attention of the Maxolhx was a self-inflicted wound, Skippy. That was my fault, for not considering the long-term consequences of asking you to screw with Elder wormholes.”

  “Shit. You’re right.”

  “Think about this, Skippy: imagine if we had sparked a Kristang civil war when we first heard about the surveyor starship going to Earth. That would have ended external threats to my homeworld. We would then not have needed to manipulate wormholes in a way that got the apex species worried enough to send ships to Earth.”

  “Damn, you’re right. But what about the people on Paradise?”

  “Saving them was optional, Skippy. We chose that fight. Remember, the final straw for the Maxolhx was when we busted an Elder wormhole by jumping through it. That happened after we rescued Paradise, and got a civil war started.”

  “Yeah, yeah, I remember. That was my fault for letting myself get attacked by that computer worm.”

  “No, it wasn’t entirely your fault.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “No way. First, I am the captain of this ship. I am responsible for what we do, for the actions of everyone aboard. Plus, you got sneak-attacked by the worm during our Black Ops mission. We would not have needed to conduct that mission at all, if I had gotten the Kristang to kill each other in a civil war, way back at the start of this mess.”

  “Joe, you are being too hard on yourself. It is easy to second-guess yourself, but you tell me you can’t just dream up ideas on command. You didn’t have the idea to spark a civil war when we were trying to stop that Thuranin surveyor ship, after your vacation on Newark.”

  “That’s the problem. I did have that idea back then,” I admitted.

  “WHAT?” His voice was thunderous in my tiny cabin.

  “It’s true. After we left Newark you told me the Fire Dragons were paying to send a Thuranin surveyor ship all the way to Earth so they could avoid a civil war. Back then, my first thought was ‘Then we should give those MFers a civil war’. That would have solved our problems, right there.”

  “Then why in THE HELL didn’t we do that back then?” He screeched. “Crap, we had to stick a dropship in a comet, and you almost fell into a planet and burned up. The only good thing about that mission was you peeing in your pants.”

  “I did not pee in my pants.”

  “You sort of did, Joe.”

  “Whatever.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. WHY didn’t we go with the civil war thing, instead of screwing around blowing up a Thuranin ship, and then trying to ruin the Fire Dragon negotiations with the Ruhar?”

  “Because I chickened out, Skippy. It’s that simple. I thought that starting a civil war was too extreme, that it would get me in trouble when we got home.”

  “Well, it did, but you did it anyway. You did it anyway, too late to avoid a whole lot of other problems. Seriously, little Joey was worried that Mommy and Daddy would be mad if he started a civil war? Is that it?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “Holy shit.” He stared at me, open-mouthed in shock.

  “The truth is, I was new to commanding a ship back then, to commanding a team. Sparking a civil war is a big, big deal. I didn’t know if the team, or me, were up to the challenge. That’s why I didn’t mention it to anyone. The sad fact is, my actions back then were driven by my lack of confidence in myself. I didn’t have the courage to believe the Merry Band of Pirates could handle the job. All the shit that’s happened since then is on me. This is all my fault.”

  “O.M.G., dude. Whoa.” He was silent for a while. When he spoke again, in was almost in a whisper. “Damn, Joe, how do you live with yourself, knowing that your poor decision-making might cause the extinction of your entire species?”

  “If you haven’t noticed, I don’t sleep too well.”

  “But we are supposed to trust you to handle the job now?”

  “Do we have a choice? Is there anyone else you think could do the job better? Please say yes. Because I don’t know if I can do this again either.”

  “No. There isn’t anyone else I can think of. Damn it! We are screwed now! I don’t have the time or energy to break in a new monkey. Whoo, wow. You got any other mind-blowing revelations to share with me today?”

  “Um,” I tried to think of something, anything, to lighten the mood. “You know that Pavarotti guy you like to listen to, the opera singer?”

  Skippy’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What about him?”

  “He lip-synced the whole thing.”

  The avatar’s hands flew to its mouth with a shudder of anguished horror, and it faded out.

  Finally, I could go back to bed.

  As if I could sleep well that night, or any other night.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Sir?” Adams came into my office without knocking. She could see I had my forehead resting on the desktop, so she wasn’t interrupting anything.

  In response, I mumbled something incoherent. It had been a sleepless night, worse after my conversation with Skippy. Breakfast had not appealed to me, I had not even gone to the galley for a cup of coffee. Part of my avoiding the galley was I wanted to avoid people. Until yesterday, the crew admired me, or acted as if they did. Our triumphant Renegade mission had earned me respect. Even the special operators often flashed a subtle thumbs-up gesture to me, which was thrilling. Now I feared those same people would view my last mission as a worthless stunt, nothing more than a brief stay of execution for humanity and that it was all my fault.

  Worse than their accusing looks, was knowing they were right.

  “Hey, soldier,” she slapped the back of my head. And not playfully. “You aren’t authorized to take leave. We are in a crisis.”

  “We’re in a mess, and it’s my fault,” I mumbled back.

  “We are in a mess, and it is partly your stupid fault, and the only way humanity is getting out of this alive is for you to stop moping around feeling sorry for yourself, and do the fucking job the United States Army pays you so lavishly for.”

  “Adams, I am really not in the mood for-”

  “Not. In. The. MOOD?” She was in full United States Marine Corps gunnery sergeant mode. “What the hell kind of- Oh, boo fucking hoo, everyone is being mean to poor little Joey. Hey, it’s a good thing you didn’t try signing up for the Marine Corps, because Marines don’t give excuses for-”

  That got me angry enough to shove my self-pity aside for the moment. I sat up in my chair. “Do not give me that inter-service rivalry bullshit, Gunny. The Army expects just as much-”

  “I know what the Army expects, Sir.” She glared at me. It is possible the word ‘Sir’ had never been spoken with less respect intended. The look she gave me was anything but friendly. I had not just disappointed her, I had disappointed her, if you know what I mean. “The Army expects you to do your duty, even when you aren’t feeling up to it. You owe it to humanity to put on your thinking cap, and get us out of this one.”

  “Adams, thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m not avoiding the call of duty. I might be the wrong person for this particular job.”

  That made her pause to consider the situation. She pulled out a chair and sat down. “How is that? Explain.”

  “So far, we’ve been able to dodge bullets by sneaking around and doing clandestine black ops stuff.” I looked her in the eyes and shook my head. “The Maxolhx are sending a battlegroup to complete the mission to investigate our local wormhole. Stopping a battlegroup is outside my skill set, Adams.” As I said ‘skill set’, a small part of my mind wondered when I had started using buzzwords without being ironic about it. I used to be a guy who hated buzzwords. I miss that guy.

  “Maybe,” she agreed with an ever-so-slight tilt of her head.

  “Whatever we do, no matter how amazingly clever our plan is,” I said, and right then I had zero idea of what that plan could be. “It ends with a stand-up fight against a senior-speci
es battlegroup, and that’s a fight we can’t win. I don’t know if I’m the right commander for a pure combat mission. Plus, it’s hopeless, we can’t-”

  “That’s not entirely true, Joe,” Skippy announced with way more cheerfulness than was appropriate for the occasion, as his avatar shimmered to life on my desk.

  “What isn’t true? You’re saying I am the right person to-”

  “Oh, no way, Dude. Sorry. You may not be the right person for the job, even if it did only involve sneaky black ops shit. Our situation is not completely hopeless. You assume that the Maxolhx will send a battlegroup to Earth no matter what we do out here. That is not true.”

  Adams and I shared a look of surprise. And a glimmer of hope. He had given me hope. If he was screwing with me, I was going to drop him into a star. “How do you figure that?” I asked. “If this is just you saying some happy bullshit to make me feel better, then-”

  “Make you feel better? Why would I do that?” He asked, mystified. “Oh, right, that stupid empathy shit. I forgot. No, this is no bullshit. Listen, numbskull, you already gave the Maxolhx plenty of reason not to go through the effort and expense of sending ships all the way to Earth.”

  “Yeah, I did, but then Perkins screwed the whole thing up by-”

  “I’m not talking about the cover story you cooked up. That was totally brilliant, and it pisses me off that such an inventive plan got blown, just because you failed to tell Emily Perkins what is going on out here. Anywho, I am not talking about the cover story, I’m talking about what we did to sell it.”

  “Uhhh-” My mind was drawing a complete blank. I had no idea what he meant.

  “I’m talking,” his avatar jammed its tiny hands on its hips, “about when you asked me to make other wormholes act crazy, to match the way I made the Earth wormhole go crazy. That sold the idea that wormholes can become violently unstable, violent enough to destroy a senior-species warship and severely damage another. That-”

  Adams interrupted him. “I think I know where you’re going with this,” she said with a snap of her fingers. “Those other wormholes you screwed with are close to Maxolhx territory.”

  As she spoke, a lightbulb went on in my head. I kept my mouth shut and let her talk.

  “So,” she looked to me to see if I understood and I nodded. She snapped her fingers again. “If the Maxolhx want to investigate why wormholes are acting strangely, they don’t need to fly all the way to Earth.”

  “Egg-zactly!” Skippy pronounced happily, not the snarky way he usually said that. “Very good, Margaret. Hey, Joe, maybe she should be in command.”

  “That would be fine with me.” I kind of wasn’t joking about that.

  “No way, Sir,” she folded her arms across her chest. “You’re not dumping this on me. The UN assigned this command to you.”

  “Shit. All right, all right, all right,” I mumbled while my mind was racing. “Okaaaaay, maybe we are not completely, a hundred percent screwed. Yeaaaaaah,” I rubbed my chin while I considered the notion that we might, just might, have a chance to stop a Maxolhx battlegroup from ravaging our home planet.

  Damn it. Giving up on the survival of humanity sucked, but at least it was easy. Saving the world is hard work. I was not looking forward to another intense, agonizing struggle. “Sure, the Maxolhx do not need to go all the way to Earth, if all they want to do is examine the odd behavior of wormholes. But, they believe that those ships were destroyed because they were going to Earth, that someone wants to stop them from getting to Earth. I have no idea how we can explain why those two Maxolhx warships were destroyed, without pointing a finger at us. What I do know is we have some work to do, before we start making plans. We need to fly all the way back to that Maxolhx relay station we boarded to plant the cover story on a timer, so we can erase the cover story from its memory.”

  “Oh, that is not a problem, Joe. We actually do not need to go all the way back to that particular relay station,” Skippy said, and he was so happy he didn’t bother to throw in an automatic ‘you dumdum’ at the end of his statement. “Behold, the incomparable magnificence of ME. Because you are a monkey and, let’s face it, not the smartest of monkeys, I figured you might have screwed something up and would need to change some details of the cover story. Therefore-”

  We waited for him to continue, but his avatar just stood there silently, moving just enough for us to know he wasn’t frozen or suffering a blue screen.

  Adams lifted her eyebrows at me, so I said “Uh, is there more to-”

  His avatar threw up his hands. “That was a dramatic,” he trilled the ‘R’, “pause, so you can contemplate just how incredibly awesome I am. Anywho, I left a backdoor in the programming of the AI that controls that relay station. All I need to do is transmit a simple file through a relay station of any Maxolhx client species, and it will update the cover story when it eventually reaches the target relay station. That includes erasing the entire cover story. Which is what I assume you now want to do, since that cover story obviously no longer matches the facts the Maxolhx can verify.”

  “Wow,” I looked at Adams and she nodded, as impressed as I was. “Skippy, sometimes I realize that, as insufferably arrogant as you are-”

  “Hey!” He protested. “You jerk, I should-”

  “Maybe you aren’t arrogant enough,” I finished.

  “Um. Say that again?” He asked suspiciously.

  “I am a hundred percent serious, Oh Most Magnificent One. You not only do awesome things when I ask you to, you also keep me out of trouble by doing incredible stuff I didn’t even think to ask for. You truly are awesome beyond my comprehension.”

  “Oh, uh,” his avatar actually blushed. I didn’t know he had programmed it to do that. “Well, I’m stuck working with monkeys. Someone has to think ahead on this ship. You are welcome. Even though you did not actually say ‘Thank you’.”

  “My bad. Thank you very much. You can erase the cover story from the relay station AI’s memory, without it ever knowing you screwed with it?”

  “Yup. And I can do it through the Kristang relay station we just contacted, although the file will reach its destination quicker if we upload it to a station that is not so isolated.”

  “Let’s do both,” I decided. “Upload the file here, then fly to a less isolated Kristang station to do it again.” When Adams raised a questioning eyebrow, I explained. “Approaching a second relay station is a risk, but the Dutchman could break down at any moment, or we could run into some other trouble out here. I don’t want to leave this critical file to only one relay station.”

  Skippy made a show of rubbing his chin. “While relay stations overall are exceptionally reliable, anything built and maintained by the Kristang must be considered suspect. My suggestion is we upload a file here, then fly to a Wurgalan relay station. That way, we will have two independent channels for delivery.”

  “I like that idea,” I agreed, partly because the Wurgalan overall were slightly softer targets than the Kristang, if we ran into trouble with those Octopussies again. “When can you upload the file here?”

  “The file is ready, we just need to jump back to the station,” he blinked at me smugly with an implied ‘Duh’. “Also, Nagatha has already plotted a course to a Wurgalan relay station that is four days’ travel time from here, along a route that minimizes our risk. There is one complication, Joe.”

  “I’m sure there are a hundred freakin’ complications, Skippy. Which one do you mean this time?”

  “If we are potentially going into action against the Maxolhx, we should top off the ship’s fuel tanks. The problem with that is, we should reserve our few remaining Thuranin Falcon dropships for combat operations, so the fuel-collection missions need to be flown by Kristang Dragon dropships. Dragons are smaller and less capable than Falcons. Plus, like I warned the idiots at UNEF Command, we have not practiced a refueling operation with Dragons. I wanted to test the new fuel-collection drogue using Dragons at Jupiter, but UNEF said noooooo, we
didn’t need to take that risk. Buncha morons.”

  I sighed, feeling a headache coming on. “UNEF assumed we wouldn’t need to refuel, because we were supposed to fly directly back to Earth.”

  “That’s not the real reason they didn’t want us to practice refueling with Dragons, Sir.” Adams shook her head.

  “It’s not?”

  “No. UNEF figured if you had the option to refuel out here, you would be more easily tempted into going on adventures UNEF disapproves of,” she explained.

  “Crap. You’re right. Well, we don’t have a choice about it now. Skippy, give me a list of star systems where we could refuel, and I’ll review it.”

  “What’s next, Sir?” Adams asked as I stood up.

  “Next? Right now, I have to tell this crew that our last mission might have been for nothing, and now we’re in even deeper shit than we were before. And that we may need to do this freakin’ Save the World thing all over again, because I am a short-sighted idiot.”

  She stood up also, taking a step toward the door. “If you want my advice?”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  “Leave out that last part. It’s not a big confidence booster.”

  Desai knocked on the doorframe to my office. “Do you have a minute, Captain?”

  “Sure, XO,” I paused the game I was playing on my laptop. No, I was not playing video games so I could avoid thinking about the enormous, impossible problem we had to deal with. I was playing games because my subconscious mind is more creative when I’m doing something mindless. So, I was playing Super Mario Cart to help me save humanity.

  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  “Come in, sit down. And you don’t have to call me ‘Captain’,” I added with a smile.

  “You called me ‘Captain Desai’ long after I was promoted to Major,” her smile was less jokey and more of a reprimand.

  “That’s because I’m an idiot. Don’t follow my example.”