Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “When do we start, Colonel?” Desai asked, but she was looking at Adams with the corner of her eye. The sooner we started, the sooner we would be to giving up on saving our homeworld.

  “We do not need to make a decision immediately. Skippy says we should top off the fuel tanks before starting an extended mission, and we need to think hard about the logistics of extracting people from Paradise without being detected. If the hamsters have their strategic defense satellite network complete, that complicates our planning.”

  “True,” Skippy agreed. “It will take me a while to hack into the sensor network. I will have to reestablish control each time we return. This is going to be a pain in my ass,” he moaned.

  “Yes,” I combined an eyeroll with a glare. “Glad to hear you are focused on what is really important.”

  “Says the monkey who doesn’t actually have to do any of this shit,” he grumbled.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  We set a course toward Paradise, every jump taking us toward the moment when I would violate a direct standing order, and reveal to Emily Perkins that I was not dead like she assumed. There would be no turning back, once we started asking people to leave Paradise with us.

  Along the way, partly because I wanted a cowardly excuse to delay the inevitable, we stopped to refuel the ship. We didn’t have the big Condor dropship with us, and we only one of them anyway. We used to have two, but then the Screw-up Fairy visited us during a refueling op on the mission where we rescued Paradise from a bioweapon. The next time we are visited by a fairy, I want it to be for losing a tooth.

  So, without a pair of Condors, I had to choose between the less-capable Kristang Dragons that we had plenty of, or the advanced-technology Thuranin Falcons. We were running low on Falcons also, because an insane Elder AI attacked me and Skippy while I was flying a Falcon during our Renegade mission. Skippy and I survived, along with my pilot seat and a very small section of that Falcon’s cabin, but the rest of it had become charged particles.

  If I asked Geico for a quote on dropship insurance, I would not be saving fifteen percent.

  Anyway, I decided to risk the Falcons to collect the fuel we needed. If there was trouble during the refueling op, the superior technology of those Thuranin spacecraft gave our pilots a better chance to recover, and a better chance to survive. You might think I was being sentimental about the pilots, because I am a pilot too, but you would be wrong. My reasoning was based on the undeniable fact that we only had a few pilots aboard the ship, and we couldn’t afford to lose any.

  During our extended stay at Earth, Skippy had components for an improved refueling drogue made, but we hadn’t tested it before we left. UNEF did not want me to have the option of taking the ship on an unauthorized joyride around the galaxy, so they didn’t want me easily refueling the ship. The refueling went super slowly, beginning with testing at lower and lower altitudes, before taking on raw fuel for real. With the much smaller capacity of Falcons compared to Condors, getting the ship’s tanks topped off took a lot longer than it should have.

  Yet, by the time I no longer had an excuse to delay going to Paradise, we still had no realistic plan for convincing the Maxolhx that the destruction of their ships had nothing to do with their mission to Earth. Probably because our attack on those ships was to prevent them from going to Earth.

  Going to Paradise was a huge risk, for both us and the humans there. I was scared and, I had to admit, I was also excited about meeting the Mavericks. When I met Emily Perkins, I told myself that I would not try to strangle her, for unknowingly ruining everything. Even according to Skippy, the plan I dreamed up during our Renegade mission was, and in my head I heard this in dramatic movie announcer voice, The Greatest Idea In The History Of The Universe.

  Thanks to Emily Perkins earnestly wanting to be Employee of the Month, that had all been for nothing.

  Truthfully, although it would signal the beginning of the end for Earth and the humans on Paradise, an immature little part of me was looking forward to meeting her. Frequently, my thoughts drifted to imagining what I would say to her on such a momentous occasion. Somehow, a simple Hey how you doin’, was just not good enough. I stood in front of a mirror, practicing various lines to use when I met her, which shows what a moron I am, and how unfit I am to command a starship.

  Or maybe it just shows that I am human.

  I’m going with that last one.

  Another thing I struggled with was whether, even if Perkins advised against it, I would contact Cornpone, Ski and Shauna anyway. Plus Sergeant Koch, who had been our fireteam leader in Nigeria. I could not leave them behind. I also struggled with the thought of meeting Jesse and Shauna again. Those two were an item, based on the high-level summary Skippy provided about their mission the planet Fresno, which had very nearly been a deathtrap for them and all the humans in the Alien Legion. I figured that I didn’t have time to read the summary, and that it wasn’t important compared to what the Merry Band of Pirates were doing, and I was so, so wrong about that. But mostly, I avoided the summary because it would be painful to read about people I used to know and still cared about.

  And, I had to admit, I was jealous of Jesse and Shauna. She didn’t belong to me, and if our relationship was meant to be, we would have made it work. I liked Shauna a lot, and I think she enjoyed our fling, but that was it. I was jealous because those two had a relationship, just like I was jealous when I had learned that Count Smoochula had been playing a furious duet of ‘Dueling Bedsprings’ with, well, with a surprising number of women aboard the ship. Meanwhile, I couldn’t have a relationship aboard the ship, and the few times I left the ship, I was surrounded by FBI agents for security.

  My life sucks.

  To contact Perkins, I took our Panther hotrod dropship, with Reed flying it. Thirty-nine hours behind us was a group of dropships, as many dropships as we had pilots to fly, leaving only Desai and one other pilot aboard the Flying Dutchman. Those dropships were all in stealth mode, and Skippy was confident he could establish control over the Strategic Defense network around Paradise, but that only took care of one problem. As Paradise was now a base for a battlegroup, there were ships arriving regularly, and a ship jumping into the system would have sensors Skippy could not yet control.

  In addition to the problem of keeping the group of dropships hidden while they flew through empty space, we had to get them down to the surface, then back up and out of orbit. Because the surface of Paradise was mostly ocean, the dropships could descend and ascend over areas that were loosely monitored. There was still a lot of risk involved, so I was not sleeping well while the Panther coasted toward the planet, which had grown from a bright dot to a disc, then a disc big enough to see clouds and land.

  I desperately wanted to get back to playing Super Mario Kart, or training to fly the Panther, or doing anything that took my mind off our latest impossible problem. Skippy, however, was not letting me get away with that shit.

  “Hey, question for you, Joe. What progress have you made toward dreaming up a plausible reason for the Maxolhx to buy the bullshit idea that,” he chuckled. “The disappearance of those two cruisers was not in any way related to their mission to Earth?”

  “Skippy, I can assure you that this particular solution-development process is proceeding on schedule, compared to the other apparently-impossible dilemmas we have successfully resolved,” I tried to add a note of confidence to my voice, while I sulked on a couch at the rear of the Panther’s cabin.

  “Uh huh,” he nodded, making his ginormous admiral’s hat bob alarmingly as his holographic avatar perched on an armrest. “So, you have no fucking clue how to do it?”

  “Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “Sure, except you tried to conceal your total cluelessness in a bunch of bullshit buzzwords.”

  “What can I say? At this point in every mission, we have no idea how to accomplish the objective. Yet, we always manage to pull a workable plan out of our asses somehow.”

 
“By freakin’ luck, yeah. I’ve told you this before, dumdum, your luck is going to run out soon, and karma is going to bite you on the ass. It’s only a matter of time. Could be this time. Have you considered that on our last mission, you used up whatever brilliant ideas you had left? Seriously, on our last mission, you had an idea to make the Maxolhx think their ships did go to Earth, and that there is no reason for them to send more ships to your miserable, monkey-infested mudball of a planet. Like I told you, the astounding brilliance of your plan had me completely flabbergasted by your genius. What are the odds that you can top that?”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I shot a look at him that I then realized he probably could not interpret. “All our missions seem impossible at this point, before we’ve had time to consider our options.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, numbskull. You don’t have any options. I thought our Renegade mission was impossible, and you proved me wrong. This time, trust me, there is no way out for you monkeys. You are absolutely and totally doomed.”

  “Skippy,” I was getting pissed at his gloominess. “You have, like, no future as a motivational speaker.”

  “Hey, wait? How have you seen my line of motivational posters already? They’re supposed to be a secret!”

  “Uh, you created a line of-”

  “Yeah, I have a bunch of them.” He held up his hands like he was framing a scene for a camera. “Like, ‘Failure: it is an option’. Or how about ‘Give up now, you’re most likely going to fail anyway’.”

  “How are those supposed to motivate people? You’re just telling them-”

  “The truth, Joe. I’m telling them the truth, which is way more helpful than feeding them a line of feel-good bullshit. Think about this: every corpse on Mount Everest was once a highly motivated person. That didn’t do them any good, did it? The early bird gets the worm, right? Did you ever think that maybe if the worm had not been such a go-getter, it would have slept late and not been eaten by an ambitious bird? But nooooo, somebody motivated the worm to get up early to eat dirt or whatever worms do.”

  “I-” When I opened my mouth, I was going to reflexively say something just because I didn’t like what he said. Then I had a moment to actually think, and found myself surprised. “I actually cannot argue with you about that.”

  “See? It’s much better for you monkeys to be realistic about your limited chances for success. Or in this case, your extremely slim chances for survival as a species.”

  “What if I promised the Universe, or Karma or whatever, that this is the last time I will try to get away with doing something impossible?”

  “Ha!” He laughed. “Don’t ask me, Joe. I thought you monkeys were dead meat on our last mission. You are living on borrowed time already.”

  “Yeah,” I leaned my head back against the seat. “What sucks is, I thought it was over. I thought we were done flying around doing crazy shit. Hell, I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything left to do. You know, I lied to Adams.”

  “What? You lied to Margaret? Joe, you should be ashamed of yourself. Um, what specifically did you lie about this time?”

  “I told her I had not given up on trying to save the world again, but that was bullshit. I have given up. That’s why we’re flying to Paradise, instead of doing something that might actually save Earth again.”

  “If you are hoping I will say something inspirational-”

  “No! Your posters are enough, thank you.”

  “I can’t argue against you giving up. However, you owe it to Margaret to try.”

  “Right, I guess-”

  “Even though it would be a total waste of time.”

  “Can you try to help, instead of reminding me how bad the odds are against us?”

  “Oh sure,” he sighed. “What the hell, why not? Where do you want to start?”

  “Um,” I pulled open my backpack and got out a handful of colored markers. “Adams would say I first need to define the problem.” On the bulkhead above the couch, I wrote down my thoughts. “Step One, we need a reason for the Maxolhx to believe the loss of their ships was not related to their mission to Earth.”

  “Ha!” Skippy snorted. “Good luck with that.”

  “Are you helping or not?”

  “Sorry,” he did look just a bit ashamed. “I guess it will be more entertaining for me if you try really hard before, you know, ultimately and inevitably failing. So, go ahead.”

  “Thank you so much. Ok, Step Two. Uh, I got nothing.” I put the cap back on the marker. Step One was as far as I got, like all the other times I tried to tackle the problem. He was right, it was impossible.

  “Seriously, Joe? You are giving up already? Try using logic. Here’s a hint; we don’t want the Maxolhx to know that we blew up their ships, so,” he paused. “Come on, Joe fill in the blanks.”

  “We need to blame the destruction of those ships on another species? If it wasn’t us, it had to be someone else. Great.” I thought for a moment. “We need to start with who would have a reason for stopping those ships. A reason that was totally unrelated to their mission of going to Earth, right?”

  “No,” he shook his head sadly, disappointed. “You need to start by considering which species is capable of destroying a pair of powerful Maxolhx warships. That leaves only two candidates. Me, except you obviously can’t reveal my existence to the outside Universe. So, that leaves only the Rindhalu.”

  “Nope. We can’t frame the Rindhalu for this,” I declared. “The spiders will know they didn’t do it, and they will be awfully motivated to learn who set them up. We already picked a fight with one senior species, I don’t want to give both of them a reason to kill us. Plus, we do not want to tangle with their Elder AI, remember?”

  “Ok, good point. Well,” he chuckled nervously. “That’s it, then. You are skuh-rewed, Dude.”

  “Oh, come on. That’s bullshit. There must be some species in the galaxy that could pose a threat to two isolated Maxolhx ships. I know none of the local aliens could do that, but this is a big galaxy. What other species out there in the galaxy have technology as good or better than the Jeraptha, for example?”

  “Oh, there are half a dozen species like that. There’s the Nordli, the Mjalmo, the Vestabolen, the Odensvik, the Sluuuurg,” he drew the word out. “And of course the Songesturn. None of them have-”

  “Ok, good.” I took the cap off the marker so I could write those names on the bulkhead. “We can start with that list and- Hey!” I slapped the armrest he stood on, making him jump. “You ass, you just randomly pulled those names from an Ikea catalog!”

  “No I didn’t,” he insisted, his words less convincing than the guilty look on his face.

  “Yes you did, you little shithead. I helped my sister move into a new apartment, and I had to put together bookcases she bought from Ikea. There’s the Liatorp, the Brusali, the Advala-”

  “Joe you idiot!” He jumped up and down on the desk, waving his arms frantically. “Don’t you know that if you recite the Ikea catalog in the wrong order, you could accidentally summon a demon?”

  “Really?” I gasped, shocked. Although truthfully, a part of my brain was thinking ‘how cool would that be’?

  “No. Ugh,” he was disgusted. “You are so freakin’ gullible.”

  “Can you please just answer my question?”

  “Fine,” he rolled his eyes. “I could recite a list of star-faring species across the galaxy, but that would be useless. The short answer is, there are no species in this galaxy who could pose a threat to a pair of Maxolhx warships, unless they sent a large war fleet consisting of many capital ships plus support vessels. And they would need to get lucky anyway. No way could any species conceal the movement of that many large ships. Plus they would have to explain why many of their capital ships were lost in an undeclared combat action, because the Maxolhx would hit back hard before they were destroyed. If they were destroyed. We used a sneaky trick with wormholes that no current species is capabl
e of deploying, and we still almost got our asses kicked anyway. So, the answer is, there are no species in the galaxy known to have technology that could threaten the Maxolhx, except the Rindhalu.”

  “Shit.”

  “Thus, like I said, you are screwed.”

  “I’m not giving up yet. Hey,” I snapped my fingers. “Those ships we destroyed, they were not regular production ships, right? This Maxolhx Technology Research Group had to take existing ships, and modify them for the long trip to Earth?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Soooo, maybe when they built those special ships, there was a design flaw. We don’t have to explain who destroyed them or why, we can sell a cover story that those ships simply blew up by themselves.” Damn, sometimes I am smart. I was very pleased with myself at that moment. “See? Problem solved.”

  “Um, I hate to harsh your buzz, but that is an idea that could be fueled only by your profound ignorance. The modifications to those ships were limited to increasing fuel capacity, providing the capacity to refuel themselves, and removing weapons magazines to make room for spare parts and additional sensor gear. None of those modifications would make those ships especially ‘explodey’,” he used fingers to make air quotes. “Plus, knucklehead, those ships were of two different base designs, and they were modified at different shipyards. No way would the Maxolhx believe a single design flaw caused the loss of two ships.”

  “Shit.” Just as I was enjoying a magical moment, the Universe took a dump on me. “I don’t suppose we could sell the idea that those ships were lost in an accident? A natural disaster, like they ran into a subspace rip or something?”

  “A subspace rip?” His mouth gaped open. “What do you think this is, Star Trek? There are no natural disasters that happen to Maxolhx starships, you moron. They’ve been around long enough to know everything that is in deep interstellar space, which by the way, is nothing. It’s empty like your skull, Joe. What, you want the Maxolhx to believe their ships ran into a freakin’ iceberg?”