“Fresh cream, Sir?” Reed was skeptical
“Yes, Fireball. Not all cream comes from a spray can. You make it by whipping fresh cream, that’s why it is called ‘whipped cream’.”
“Sounds like a lot of work,” Adams observed. “Have you ever actually made one of these?”
“Sure,” I did not exactly lie. “I’ve helped my mother make them plenty of times.” Technically, my part of ‘helping’ was to slice the strawberries, and whip the cream, but how hard could it be? “Ok, you two make the shrimp and grits, I will handle the strawberry roll.”
“Should we have a backup dessert?” Adams suggested gently.
“No, we do not need a ‘backup dessert’. Just watch, you will soon be eating your words.”
“I hope,” she said, “that I will be eating this strawberry thing.”
“The issue is settled,” I declared. “What are we offering for midrats?” Those were rations for people eating between midnight and 0400 ship time. “People are getting sick of dinner leftovers.”
Reed asked distractedly, already focused on making preparations for her own cooking assignment “What do you suggest, Sir?”
“How about Fluffernutters?”
“Fluff?” Adams stuck her tongue out, and shared a disgusted look with Reed. “I don’t think the crew like that, Sir.”
I sniffed. “That’s because this crew are heathen savages, Adams. It is my duty to steer them onto the path of righteousness.”
Now Reed really gave me the side-eye. “The path of righteousness is paved with Fluff?”
“The Lord works in mysterious ways, Reed.”
She giggled. “That path must be really sticky.”
I gave her my best fake scowl. “Heathen savages, Reed, that includes you.”
We did set out bread, peanut butter and Fluff for midrats, along with leftover shrimp and grits, which, by the way, was so good I asked Reed for the recipe. Despite the teasing I got, someone did eat a Fluffernutter that night.
Ok, the person who ate the Fluffernutter was me getting up to have a late-night snack. Sadly, my crew are filthy monkeys who cannot appreciate fine cuisine.
Also, the answer to ‘how hard could it be make a strawberry roll’ was: harder than I thought. I discarded four cakes that were too hard, too soft, or broke when I tried to roll them up. But when I got the technique perfected, they were excellent.
I noticed that Adams had two slices of strawberry roll.
“This is going to be very tricky, Joe,” Skippy warned me as his avatar appeared on my desk.
I froze, holding the ball I had been throwing in my hand. “Yeah, you said the same thing a week ago, and yesterday, and this morning. Is this concern something special you haven’t told me about, or just you getting nervous?”
“I do not get nervous, Joe, for I am incomparably awesome.”
“So, if this is nothing we haven’t already discussed over and over, why are you telling me about it again? We launch the op in three hours, this is a hell of a time to get cold feet.”
“There is nothing we haven’t already discussed, Joe. However, I have learned that it is important to set low expectations. That way, if a miracle happens and we are successful, I look like a genius. If everything goes to shit, I can say I told you so, and blame the whole thing on you.”
“Uh huh. Did you learn this from one of those psychology books you read, to learn about dealing with monkeys?”
“Yes! Thank you for suggesting I study that empathy crap. That was worthless, but it did make me curious about the best way I could manipulate you, to get what I want.”
“Did it work?”
“Not as far as you know, and that’s the whole point,” he answered smugly.
Stuffing the ball back in a drawer, I cradled my head in my hands and slowly counted to five. “Is that all? Because if you don’t have anything to new to add, we are proceeding with the op as scheduled.”
“Nothing new. However, I have already warned you this a low-percentage play, and you are determined to proceed anyway.”
“Ayuh, we are. I know the first time will be a test.”
“Seriously, Joe, I can’t predict what will happen. There are too many variables. No one has done this before. The network has elaborate safety protocols to prevent this from happening. I do not know how many times we will be able to try this craziness, before the network updates its security and locks me out.”
“Understood, Skippy. I would have liked to run a test before we do this for real, but I know we can’t waste a shot on a dry run. You do your best, that is all I can ask.”
“Really? Oh,” he snorted. “This is gonna be easy, then.”
“Of course, because you are incomparably magnificent, I expect nothing but mind-boggling awesomeness.”
“What?” he screeched. “Damn it, did I screw myself?”
The thing that had Skippy nervous, whether he admitted it or not, was the same thing that had butterflies dancing in my stomach. Based on the dark circles under the eyes of Desai, Smythe, Giraud, Reed, Adams and pretty much everyone else aboard the ship, we were all worried about what might go wrong with an operation that was ambitious to the point of being foolhardy. If we had a better option, we would have tried something else.
I had very much wanted to try our bagel-slicer trick on the smashed piece of Bosphuraq warship we brought with us, but each test would increase the odds of the network locking Skippy out. Skippy’s bots had modified the Bosphuraq hulk to be as close as possible to a target ship. We used the hulk to practice an assault approach, boarding maneuver, and moving throughout the target ship to eliminate opposition. We could not predict which type of Maxolhx ships we would be boarding, but the STAR teams knew how to approach so they avoided proximity-defense systems, how to breach the hull without getting themselves fried by a live power conduit, and how to move inside a Maxolhx warship. The pilots, STARs and equipment were trained up as best we could get them, so we proceeded to the target area. The hulk was dumped, to lighten the Dutchman for emergency maneuvers. Although Skippy warned if the Dutchman ever had a need to fly like a swallow, we were in such trouble that no amount of fancy twisting in space would save us.
Our target area was a wormhole in Thuranin territory, that was near a Kristang planet and did not get a lot of traffic. Skippy had data from the little green pinheads that indicated the wormhole was actually used by the Maxolhx more frequently than the Thuranin, because it provided a short-cut between zones the Maxolhx cared about. The reason the pinheads had extensive data on the travels of their patrons, was from the senior species sending a message that their lowly clients should get out of the way when a Maxolhx ship was transiting the area. The warnings were sort of a Notice To Airmen, except that these warnings were enforced with heavy weapons.
The wormhole we choose had the advantage that when Maxolhx ships used it, they were usually alone. The area was considered safe, being well inside Thuranin borders and far from any wormhole that linked to the Rindhalu coalition. Feeling safe, both because of the location and because of their supreme arrogance, the rotten kitties routinely sent cruisers and larger ships without escort vessels, cycling back to their home bases for crew rotation and maintenance.
The disadvantage of the chosen wormhole was that it saw only infrequent traffic, and we couldn’t wait forever for the right type of ships to fly through. So, we used one of Skippy’s favorite tricks to stack the deck. We flew over to a nearby wormhole that saw a heavier traffic flow, and I hung out in our stealthed Panther dropship with Skippy and four pilots. The Panther just sat motionless in space, near a wormhole emergence point. Skippy had pinged a Thuranin data relay station and learned that the Thuranin were sending a destroyer squadron through. Because the squadron was in a hurry to confront their rivals the Bosphuraq, they were taking the fastest route, and Skippy was able to predict which emergence point they were most likely to use.
Sure enough, after us being in the Panther less than six hours, a des
troyer squadron jumped in, waiting for the Elder wormhole to shift to that position, on the figure-eight track it had followed for thousands of years. “Everything is ready, Joe,” Skippy assured me in a voice that was bubbling with enthusiasm. “Hee hee, I just love being an asshole.”
“Yeah, well, punish someone else with your assholeness this time, please.”
“You got it. Ok, three, two, one, showtime!” He shouted.
On the cockpit display, we watched the event horizon of the wormhole emerge into our spacetime. It began as a pinprick, then rapidly grew to a size far greater than the width of the largest starship in existence. As always, the event horizon shimmered and fluctuated, then steadied into a stable configuration. We all held our breath as the lead destroyer maneuvered to line itself up into a precise route for transit, that minimized the risk it would contact the edge of the event horizon’s ring. Lined up, it slowly gathered speed, approaching the incredible ancient wormhole that not even Skippy fully understood. Everything was normal.
Then, Skippy played his trick. The event horizon began to fluctuate, as if it had never achieved stability. The lead destroyer altered course, yawing to the right and frantically firing thrusters, but it was too late. The wormhole spasmed, sending a roiling column of white-hot twisted spacetime outward, engulfing the lone destroyer. The event horizon then collapsed to a small dot, then grew to full size again, before abruptly winking out.
“Mission accomplished, Joe!” Skippy shouted triumphantly. “That pinhead destroyer is gone.”
“I feel just terrible about that, Skippy,” I shook my head, not taking my eyes away from the cockpit displays. It was possible the violent radiation of the outburst had overwhelmed the Panther’s stealth field, allowing the other three destroyers to detect us. There was no need for me to worry. The instruments indicated the radiation had only twelve percent of the power needed to compromise our stealth, and the three destroyers had already turned and burned, heading away to jump distance as quickly as they could.
“Hee hee,” he laughed. “I searched for a Hallmark card that says something like ‘Sorry we blew up your starship’, but sadly, they don’t have one.”
“Well, there’s a business opportunity for you, Skippy.”
“Oooh,” he gasped. “That is a great idea. I could-”
“No, that is a terrible idea. I was joking.”
“You were joking, but it is a genius idea, Joe. A line of ‘Sorry Not Sorry’ cards is something the market truly needs. Like ‘Sorry that you are a dipshit’ or “Sorry that’-”
“Can you wait until we get back to Earth? Maybe we send a fruit basket, along with our condolences?”
“Sure, Joe,” he chuckled. “I’ll get right on that.”
We waited until the three destroyers jumped, then flew out to jump distance and signaled the Dutchman to pick us up. The Thuranin would warn their patrons about the dangerous behavior of that wormhole, which hopefully would divert some traffic to the wormhole we wanted them to use. Damn it, nothing the Merry Band of Pirates ever did was simple or easy.
“That was outstanding, Skippy,” I offered his avatar a high-five, and he slapped me as best his hologram could.
“Thank you, Joe, but we may have a problem,” he answered in a low voice. “I don’t know how many more times I can pull that exploding-wormhole trick, before the network locks me out from doing that. So far, I have been able to do it, by triggering the wormhole to perform sort of an unscheduled purge cycle. A purge like that expels particles that have become caught in the wormhole’s matrix over time, and normally a purge occurs in a higher level of spacetime. What I have been doing is screwing with the wormhole’s internal sensor readings, so it thinks there is a hazardous build-up of particles in its matrix. Eventually, the network will block me from doing that again, because running a purge in this layer of spacetime can cause stress on the matrix.”
“Shit. Ok, I’ll keep that in mind. Is there any way you can predict how many more purges you can run?”
“Unfortunately, no. The network has been checking its sensors, and is beginning to question whether the data about a hazardous build-up is accurate. Once it catches onto the truth, it will reset the sensors and I will be blocked from that particular trick.”
“Smythe reports dropships are ready. Assault teams are in position and awaiting the ‘Go’ order,” Desai reported from the CIC.
I flashed a thumbs up from the command chair. “Tell Smythe I wish his team ‘good hunting’.” More likely, the STAR team would wait for nothing, until the point when they became combat-ineffective and we needed to pull them back inside the Dutchman for downtime to recover. We had the entire STAR team sealed up in armored suits, sitting in dropships with the rear ramps open, in docking bays that had the big doors open to the hard vacuum of interstellar space. The dropships had their engines warmed up, and docking clamps had their safeties removed. When the Dutchman jumped into position, the STARs needed to move at maximum speed, with the dropships burning heavy gees to intercept and latch onto the target ship, before it could react and blow them to dust. The whole operation would require precise timing, unhesitating speed, and most importantly, snap decision making. We had practiced the assault operation using the Bosphuraq warship hulk, until Smythe, Desai, Reed and I were satisfied we had prepared as best we could, without having access to an actual Maxolhx ship.
Even elite troops could only sit and wait sealed up in suits for a limited time, before they began to lose the razor-sharp focus that was needed. The dropship pilots, wearing flightsuits but having their helmet visors open behind the pressure door of the cockpits, also would lose focus after a while. Because we had so few people aboard the ship, we had to commit the entire STAR team to the boarding operation. Four dropships would lead the assault, with two dropships in reserve to exploit opportunities as they developed, or to reinforce, if necessary, extract a team if they got into trouble. Skippy was making no assurances about the state of defenses aboard the Maxolhx ship, so we had to be ready for the worst.
My breakfast that morning had been plain oatmeal and a half cup of tea. I was so keyed-up and anxious that caffeine wasn’t needed, and my stomach was already doing backflips. “Skippy, what’s your assessment? Are we as ready as we can be?”
“I can’t think of anything else we could do to prepare,” He announced with confidence.
“Thank you.”
“Of course, if there is something I forgot, then by definition I don’t know about it,” he mused. I heard the unspoken ‘duh’ in his tone. “Also, you have to consider that this operation is a troop of screeching monkeys attempting to capture a senior-species warship. So I am seriously grading on a curve here.”
Gritting my teeth, I shook a fist at the speaker in the ceiling. “Once again, your words fill me with confidence.”
“Really?” He was puzzled. “Maybe you didn’t hear what I said., dumdum. I figure the odds of us succeeding at this lunatic scheme is-”
“Skippy,” Nagatha blessedly interrupted him. “The crew do not need to know the odds you calculated.
“Well, I would want to know,” he grumbled.
“They do not wish to know, and you are guessing anyway, dear,” she chided him.
“Skippy,” I spoke before he could go on a rant. “What are the odds of us stopping a battlegroup, if we only have the old Dutchman to work with?”
“Well, zero,” he admitted. “Ok, the ship is in position, and I have established a handshake with the wormhole network. Estimate initial connection will be established in seventeen minutes, thirty-four seconds. That time has a plus or minus of forty-eight seconds.”
“Sir?” Desai called from the CIC. “This still seems sketchy to me. If this is so easy, why haven’t we used this capability before?”
“Because,” an irritated Skippy answered. “I didn’t know until recently that the network had this capability. Technically, it is not an ability, it is how the network functions. It’s not something that can be swi
tched on or off, so I am not asking or instructing it to do anything. Ugh,” he sighed. “Do I need to give you monkeys a refresher course on wormhole operations?”
“Yes, please,” I said before Desai could respond. None of us needed to hear him babble on about stuff our poor monkey brains could not possibly understand, but I thought hearing his voice would distract me from worrying about the potential disaster we were hopefully soon going to jump into.
“Fine,” he was thoroughly disgusted. “I’ll dumb this down as much as I can stand. As you should already know, Elder wormholes have two endpoints, the ends of this particular wormhole are separated by an average of one hundred seventy-eight lightyears. To avoid damaging the underlying fabric of local spacetime, the endpoints hop around in a figure-eight pattern. The pattern on the other end spans one point two lightyears, the pattern on this end covers a distance of point seven lightyears, for reasons that I am not going to bother explaining to you. When-”
“We know all this,” Desai didn’t appreciate being talked down to. “We have been transitioning through Elder wormholes for years. What I want is some assurance that this magical new feature, that you just recently discovered, will work the way you told us. Because you have never done this before. I also want to know, if this feature is something wormholes have always done, why you didn’t know about it before.”
“I have never, ugh.” He verbally threw up his hands. Desai asked good questions and she was tough, Skippy couldn’t weasel out of answering her. “Yes, the wormhole network always does this, and always has. I did not know because, until recently, I didn’t know to ask the network if it could do that. The stupid thing doesn’t volunteer information, I have to ask it a specific question.”
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