Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “That’s eas- easy for you to say,” I stammered through a sleep-deprived yawn. “The waiting is killing me.”

  “Me too, Joe. Me too.”

  Days Eleven through Fifteen passed with no information relevant to us. The station was regularly sending us burst transmissions with updates, both so we could be informed of any new freakin’ disasters the Grumpy Band of Pirates had to deal with, and so we could be sure that Skippy’s hacking into the AI had not busted the stupid thing. After I nagged him about it for a full day, Skippy consented to running a diagnostic on the relay station’s AI, to confirm it was operating properly. He then informed me that, tragically, the hot water pipe to my personal shower was broken and it would take several days to fix it. I thought that was odd, because the water supply pipe itself heated the water. The following morning, I froze myself trying to shower in water that apparently had just melted off a glacier. The shower in the gym, which had been nice and hot for the guy using it before me, also mysteriously malfunctioned and sprayed out frigid water when it was my turn.

  The worst part is, when I got enough control of my shivering hands to open the shower door for a towel, there was Anastacia the sexbot waiting for me, with an armful of towels. She was wearing a shapeless gray coverall that somehow hugged her curvaceous form perfectly. “Do you need a towel, Joseph? You look cold. Ooooh,” she giggled and squinted. “Is that what you men call ‘shrinkage’?”

  I got the message and resolved never to nag Skippy again.

  In the future, I would ask Nagatha to do it for me.

  Days Sixteen through Twenty-Two dragged by with agonizing slowness. Smythe called a downtime cycle for his exhausted STAR team, and Reed eased up on pilot training. People had their skills honed to a razor edge, at that point what they needed was rest. The evening of Day Twenty-Two was an impromptu Karaoke night in the galley, which the crew needed to blow off steam. Even the certain knowledge that Skippy would insist on singing did not dampen people’s spirits.

  They didn’t know what I did. If they did, the crew would have locked themselves in their cabins and claimed a severe illness.

  “Hey, Joe, this misfit barrel of monkeys are in for a real treat tonight,” he boasted.

  An involuntary shudder shook my shoulders and I tried to pretend I was stretching, by pumping my arms over my head. “Well, I know I for sure can hardly wait. Um, please, can you give me a hint?” Maybe I could take pity on the crew by calling a surprise combat drill right before the karaoke started.

  “Well, if you must know,” he said with false modesty. “It is a medley of selections from my epic opera ‘Homefront’.”

  “Oh, no, don’t do that, Skippy.”

  “Why not?” He pouted.

  “Listen, you are justifiably proud of what is surely a ground-breaking work of art, right? Do you really think the galley of a stolen pirate ship is the proper forum for a debut of such an epic? You know our crew. Do you really think this barrel of screeching monkeys are capable of appreciating the vast scope of your artistic vision?”

  “Hmm,” he bowed his head thoughtfully. “Perhaps you are right about that, Joe.”

  “Trust me, I know I am,” I crossed my fingers behind my back for good luck. “Don’t you have something else you can serenade us with?”

  “Not really, nothing new. I have been mostly focused on the arias for ‘Homefront’.”

  “Are you sure? No fifteenth-century Hungarian folk songs? No Tibetan throat singing?”

  “Nope.”

  “Come on, Skippy. I have heard you muttering bits of songs when you think no one is listening. You made me listen to Homefront, I mean, you allowed me the honor of hearing parts of it, so I know you were singing something different.”

  “I do not ‘mutter’, Joe,” he sniffed.

  “What I meant is, it sounds like you are lost in the artistic process,” I used the best line of bullshit I could think of right then.

  “Oh. I guess that is possible.”

  “So, what have you been singing that is not your Homefront opera?”

  “Well, heh heh, there is one other thing I have been playing around with.”

  His ‘heh heh’ made my blood freeze, but I asked the question anyway. “Please, don’t make me guess. What is it?”

  “If you must know-”

  “I am dying to know,” I assured him.

  “The experience of writing Homefront was so rewarding, I looked for other subjects for an epic opera. Naturally, I was inspired by the Estonian agronomist Ingmar Saarsoo’s groundbreaking and influential 1923 research paper ‘The Effects of Introducing Organophosphate Fertilizers on Agricultural Production in the Lower Silesia Basin’.”

  “Oh,” I choked on a laugh, trying to shove the traitorous thing back down my throat before Skippy noticed. “Of course. That is pure genius, Skippy.”

  “Why, thank you. You’re right, it is kind of an obvious inspiration for an epic opera,” he continued with utterly pure cluelessness. “But I will apply my unique vision to make it special.”

  “Uh huh, uh huh,” I stared at the deck and clenched my fists to prevent my inner mirth from bubbling to the surface. “Do you plan to base the opera on the research paper itself, or on the movie version?”

  “There was a MOVIE about it?” He bellowed with anguish.

  “Well, sure, I thought you knew,” I lied. “It had Clark Gable,” I named the first Golden Age actor I could think of who was not John Wayne. “And that actress, um,” my brain locked up. Judy Garland? No, not her. “I can’t remember her name right now.”

  “Ohhhhh, crap,” he was almost in tears.

  I almost felt sorry for the little guy. Then I thought of how the crew would suffer if he sang about fertilizer. My crew. “Damn, Skippy, I am terribly sorry for you.”

  “They made a movie about it. Damn it! Now I’ll have to scrap the whole thing and start over. Buncha jerks.”

  “I’m sure you can think of something else to sing about.”

  “Joe,” he choked up. “Tonight, I do not feel like singing.”

  “Uh.” I knew we would all pay later if he did not get his moment of glory that evening. “Hey, how about you perform a duet with Frey?” To me, it would be a bonus for them to sing together, because her voice was equally as awful as Skippy’s. We could kill two birds with one stone, and get it over with quickly. “Please?”

  He sighed. “If you insist. But I must warn you, it will be an uninspired performance.”

  I had to sit on my traitorous fists to stop them from pumping the air in triumph. “We will appreciate you making the sacrifice for us, Skippy.”

  Skippy’s moment on stage was mercifully brief, and his singing was truly uninspired.

  I was totally Ok with that.

  Yes, I did feel bad about ruining his day, but it was only temporary. Eventually, he would dig into the vast collection of files he extracted from databases on Earth, and realize there was no movie about Estonian fertilizer or whatever. I would catch hell from him for lying, but by that point hopefully he would have moved on to another project. Anything had to be better than an opera about fertilizer.

  I was wrong about that, as you will learn later.

  Anyway, the festivities on Day Twenty-Two served to end our drought. That was a good thing, because I was getting desperate enough to sacrifice a jar of Fluff to the gods. “Joe! Joe Joe Joe Joe-”

  Of course, the message arrived in the middle of the night. I awoke to find Skippy’s hologram sitting on my chest, waving its arms to get my attention. I guess I’m lucky his holographic hands could not slap me.

  Oh, damn it, do NOT mention that to Skippy, or he will upgrade his hologram to add that feature.

  “Uh,” I had to swallow a couple times to get my mouth working. “What is it?”

  “I have good news, Joe!”

  Not wanting to get my hopes up, I did not ask if it was about the Maxolhx. “Did you find a new subject for an opera?”

  “Huh?” He wa
s taken aback. “How did you know that? Yes, I have been inspired by the 1932 Manhattan phone directory. No way did anyone make a movie about that. Ha, suck it, Hollywood!”

  “The phone book?” I groaned. “Is the first verse of the opera something like ‘AAAAA Auto Repair’?”

  He sucked in a breath. “How did you know that?!” He screeched at me.

  “Lucky guess. Can I go back to sleep now?”

  “What? And miss all the fun? The news just came in from the relay station. It would have come in sooner, but the ship that delivered the update lingered near the station for five freakin’ hours while performing minor maintenance, so the station could not send the data to us until it left. It worked, Joe! The Maxolhx have given the Bosphuraq a major beat-down all across the sector. Everyone is talking about it!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Five minutes later, I was on the bridge, where the duty officer gave the command chair to me. Someone brought me a cup of coffee, and soon the entire ship was awake. I didn’t give orders to wake up the off-duty personnel, and Skippy didn’t interrupt their sleep. It happened organically, with people pinging their friends so they didn’t miss the excitement. I called Adams because I knew she would be pissed if I didn’t. Also because I wanted to share the moment with her.

  Because there was not enough room in the Bridge/CIC complex for the crew to squeeze in comfortably, I went to the galley to review the updates. Most of the crew joined me there, except for the handful still on duty. I could have stayed on the bridge and suggested people gather in the galley, but they naturally wanted to be with their captain. It’s like at a party where the host sets out food around the house, but everyone crowds into the kitchen anyway. It’s an instinct for us humans.

  Skippy used the big display screen we used for movies to show his analysis of the file we received. The data was transmitted by a Bosphuraq ship, so some of the stuff we saw were first-hand accounts of the devastation, including video. Man, it looked bad. The worst part was a moon where the Bosphuraq had a research facility they thought was secret. Skippy told us the base, buried deep below the moon’s surface, was dedicated to reverse-engineering advanced alien technology, including Maxolhx tech they had found, stolen or purchased. Nothing the Bosphuraq were doing there was any sort of threat to the Maxolhx, but that did not deter the rotten kitties from making an example of that facility. The moon was small, only about a thousand miles in diameter, barely big enough for gravity to have pulled it into a spherical shape, and it orbited a sparsely-populated planet that was mostly covered with glaciers. The planet reminded me of Newark, except Skippy assured me this place was a frozen iceball due entirely to natural conditions, and it never was home to a native intelligent species.

  Anyway, the video we watched was from a Bosphuraq satellite. Two Maxolhx ships jumped in near the moon, with shields up and weapons hot, announcing the Bosphuraq were about to be punished for their crimes. The ships then jumped away abruptly, having stayed there just long enough to recalibrate their drive coils for an accurate jump. A second later, the moon was cracked in half, then the pieces shattered. In minutes, all that was left of the moon was a cloud of debris. Skippy later told me that a significant portion of the moon would rain down on the planet below, throwing enough dust into the atmosphere to block out the local sun, and dooming that world to at least several thousand years of being locked in a solid covering of ice.

  It is a good thing I had ignored my broker’s advice to invest in a vacation condo there.

  The really shocking thing about the incident was how the Maxolhx cracked an entire moon. At first, it was not clear what had happened, partly because the two ships jumping away had been the focus of the satellite’s attention. The Bosphuraq were fearfully speculating that their patrons had deployed technology the birdbrains could barely imagine. I was afraid the rotten kitties had somehow used Elder weapons, like the devices that scooped out perfect half-spheres from moons scattered around the Orion Arm. Skippy rejected that idea, pointing out that what we saw was no mere crater, and that no material was displaced, the moon was simply blown up.

  He was able to analyze the video, and he realized what had happened; the Maxolhx simply hit that moon with a bullet. A big bullet, traveling really, really fast. Like, it was traveling at an estimated seventy-three percent of lightspeed. Almost half a billion miles per hour.

  “Holy shhhhh,” my voice trailed off in a whisper. “The Maxolhx have a railgun that powerful?” The railgun that the Flying Dutchman’s used to have could not achieve anywhere near that power, and the darts propelled by that railgun’s electromagnets were tiny compared to the big bullet that impacted that moon.

  “No, Joe,” he shook his head. “I am pretty sure they did not use a railgun, at least, not a railgun aboard a starship. In fact, this incident confirms something I have heard rumors about, that the Maxolhx have relativistic darts free-flying around the Milky Way galaxy, in areas where there is little dust to erode their momentum. The Maxolhx likely built special robotic ships that took years to accelerate these objects. Anomalous high-energy radiation has been detected in isolated areas of the galaxy, which is suspected of coming from these objects striking stray hydrogen atoms. The rumor states that each object is equipped with a jump drive. On command, an impactor can make several jumps to emerge close to its designated target, giving that target no time to react.”

  I frowned and looked at the video again. Just like Skippy said, when the image was enhanced and run in super-duper slow motion, you could see something emerged from a jump wormhole and there was also a streak from the wormhole to the moon’s surface. Just after that, the moon cracked in half, along the line of that streaking object. “That sounds like a lot of effort, just to destroy a research base.”

  “It is an impractical level of effort to sustain, true,” he agreed. “I suspect that weapon was not originally targeted at the Bosphuraq. It was most likely intended to strike Rindhalu facilities, but over the years it flew beyond jump range of any Rindhalu potential targets, and drifted close to that Bosphuraq star system. The Maxolhx used that weapon for two purposes. First, to make a spectacular show of how serious they are about punishing rebellious clients. Second, and I think more importantly, use of that weapon was directed at the Rindhalu. The Maxolhx were sending a message, that the spiders should not view an attempted rebellion by the Bosphuraq, as an opportunity to strike the Maxolhx while their coalition is weak. We can hit you hard, is the message the Maxolhx are sending to the Rindhalu.” He chuckled.

  “Skippy,” I was surprised. No, I was dismayed by his making light of the situation. Part of my anger was my own guilt at having started the whole mess. A habitable planet was about to be plunged into a severe ice age, possibly wiping out an entire biosphere, and forcing evacuation of the population currently living on the surface. “This,” I pointed at the image of the exploding moon, “is not funny.”

  “Oh,” he did a good gesture of raised eyebrows. “I was not laughing at that. The subject of my mirth is the Maxolhx thinking their relativistic impactors can be a threat to the Rindhalu. Unknown to the rotten kitties is that the spiders have surrounded their important planets and other facilities with a field that is sort of a super version of the technology I installed to slow down and catch bullets in our rifle range. Any impactor would be destroyed and its kinetic energy dissipated before it could hit the surface of a Rindhalu world.”

  “Oh. Sorry I snapped at you. Hey, isn’t using a relativistic impactor a violation of the Number Five Rule of Engagement in this war?”

  “Wow, I am impressed by your memory, Joe. You learned The Rules way back on Camp Alpha, before you shipped out to Paradise.”

  “Something like that kind of sticks in your mind, Skippy.”

  “I can see that. Anyway, you mean the rule that prohibits dropping asteroids or comets on a habitable world? Technically yes, what the Maxolhx did to that moon does violate the spirit of The Rules. However, you forgot something very important.”
>
  “Um, because that moon didn’t have a biosphere?”

  “No,” he chuckled again. “Because those rules were written by the Maxolhx and Rindhalu, to protect them and their interests. The rules don’t apply to them.”

  “Oh,” I ground my teeth together. “Of course.”

  We watched a couple more images of Maxolhx ships using conventional weapons against other Bosphuraq facilities, including pounding one target in the center of a city on a heavily-populated planet. Although the Bosphuraq were our enemies and they would happily exterminate humanity if they got the chance, seeing the destruction of that city made me feel sick. Collateral damage spread for kilometers from the impact zone. The only good news was the attack just happened to be at night, when the commercial and industrial heart of the city was mostly unoccupied. Collateral damage did extend into residential areas outside the city center. When the video showed a scene of a young Bosphuraq screaming in the wreckage of a collapsed apartment building, the cheering in the galley fell silent. I had to leave the galley at that point.

  Adams came out into the corridor, carrying a fresh cup of coffee for me. I didn’t need any more coffee, and she knew that, and she knew I understood that her offering me coffee was just a supportive gesture.

  It meant a lot to me.

  “Thanks,” I said as I blew on the too-hot coffee, trying to cool it so I could drink.

  “You are thinking that those deaths are on you,” she said bluntly.

  “It’s not-”

  “You’re right, they are,” she looked me right in the eye. “Both because you initiated the Maxolhx attack, and because your actions beginning years ago lead us to the point where we needed to frame the Bosphuraq.”