Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  What Skippy was referring to was a minor incident, that happened when he requested a super-duty wormhole to reopen a connection to a dormant wormhole in the Sculptor dwarf galaxy. He thought it was a minor incident, until he mentioned it to me in a casual conversation while we were waiting for the Three Stooges to approve allowing ground teams to drop onto Avalon.

  When the network agreed to attempt establishing a connection to Sculptor, it informed Skippy that first it would need to establish a sort of microwormhole to investigate the condition of the other end. The network conducted that recon to determine whether the other end of the wormhole had drifted close to a star, or was in a dense asteroid field. If even one dangerous rock was in front of where the wormhole was to emerge, the network would cancel opening the full-size event horizon, and shift to an alternate endpoint.

  At the time, Skippy had mentioned that network feature as a curious but unimportant aspect of reopening a wormhole to a distant galaxy, but then I asked him if wormholes always investigated the space around both endpoints before allowing the event horizons to emerge. To his astonishment, the answer was yes, a fact that got him very embarrassed. The network used sensors to scan the area around both endpoints, and Skippy could tap into that data feed. Suddenly, we could see what was on the other end of a wormhole, even before the wormhole emerged fully into local spacetime.

  That nugget of information opened up a whole world of possibilities for us, and it was how we could make the bagel-slicer idea work. With the recon feature, we could know what was on the other side of a wormhole, even before it opened. If the wormhole sensors told us that a single Maxolhx warship was waiting on the other side, then Skippy would instruct the network to connect that endpoint to the endpoint on our end where we had set a trap. If there were multiple Maxolhx warships, or ships of another species, or nothing, Skippy would let the network emerge on our end at another point. To set our trap, we had selected an emergence point the network had cycled through recently, and would not open there again for months.

  What if a group of ships jumped in near the other end of the wormhole after it opened, while it was connected to our trap? That was easy; Skippy would simply tell the network to shut the wormhole down early. Those other ships might think that was odd, but it was not so unusual that they would avoid using the wormhole.

  So, suddenly, we had an ability to select which ships would go through the wormhole, and where they would emerge. The time between us receiving sensor data, and emergence of the event horizon, was only eleven seconds. We had to rely on Skippy and Nagatha to decide whether to spring our trap, or let the wormhole follow its pre-programmed circuit. We still had no ability to make Maxolhx ships use that wormhole, or predict when they would be there, or whether they came singly or in groups. That was why we had to cycle the assault teams off and on, while we waited. Hopefully, we would not have to wait too long.

  Anyway, we waited three days before the first ship approached the other end of the wormhole. Fortunately, the assault team was fresh at that time, having sealed up their suits and announced they were ready less than forty minutes before. Unfortunately, the ship on the other side was just a Thuranin star carrier that was hauling five ships, so we let it go. Over the next two days there were seven other times when ships knocked on the other side of the wormhole. Skippy let the wormhole do its thing without interfering, because none of those ships were candidates for us to use. One time, we did detect the presence of Maxolhx ships, but that was ships, as in more than one. A formation of three, to be precise. We let them go on their merry way. I was beginning to get discouraged when the next day, a single Maxolhx cruiser approached the wormhole. It was a prime candidate except for the timing, because the assault teams were on a downtime cycle right then. Naturally, it worked that way, because the Universe loved screwing with me. That day was the first time I saw Jeremy Smythe lose his temper. Anger and frustration broke through his usual stiff-upper-lip British reserve, and he went to the gym to beat the shit out of a punching bag. I happened to be in the gym at that time, and I pretended I didn’t hear as he cursed and took out his rage on the bag.

  It was good for me to know someone else was pissed off at the Universe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Finally, three days after that extremely frustrating incident, we found a perfect target while the assault team was ready.

  “Bingo, Joe!” Skippy shouted with glee. “Another Maxolhx cruiser is knocking on the door, and it’s alone. Shall I tell it nobody is home?”

  “Please don’t do that, Oh Most Magnificent One,” I clenched one fist to get a handle on my anxiety, while using the other hand to cross my fingers for good luck. “Nagatha, you agree?”

  “Oh, yes, Colonel Bishop” she answered. “This is a prime opportunity. I can’t wait to see you monkeys in action again, this is truly thrilling.”

  “Ok, Skippy, make it so.”

  “Make it so? Joe, you are nowhere close to being smart like Captain Picard.”

  “Uh, how about I just say ‘Engage’?”

  “Ha! Captain Janeway was smarter and way better looking than you. But I’ll throw you a bone and do it anyway. Event horizon emerging at our trap in three, two, one, showtime!”

  On the bridge display, I saw the familiar sight of an event horizon emerging into our local spacetime. It flickered, then stabilized. “Smythe, it looks like we’re doing this. Go on Skippy’s signal, don’t wait for me to confirm.” The situation would likely be too chaotic for my slow monkey brain to keep up with events.

  “Acknowledged,” Smythe replied with curt efficiency.

  “Ok, I am communicating with the wormhole network,” Skippy announced with the smug tone he used when he did something particularly awesome. “It will be another two minutes before I have control of the wormhole to activate the bagel slicer. Plenty of time, because the target ship is still maneuvering slowly, lining up its approach.”

  “Please do not crush it into dust,” I requested.

  “Hey, give me a break. This is my first time. You try it and see how well you do, huh? Never fear, Joe, I know how to do this and- Uh oh. Um, oopsy?” Skippy gulped like a small boy who just burned down the house by setting off fireworks in the living room.

  “Oopsy? Damn it, Skippy! What the hell did you do wrong this time?”

  “I don’t know yet, Joe! All I know is that somehow, that ship detected us from the far side of the wormhole. How the hell- Joe, I have no freakin’ idea how that ship could know we are here. Damn it! Maybe the Maxolhx have capabilities I don’t know about.”

  “Shit! It’s getting away? Oh, this is bad.” My mind raced through our options. The best thing to do would be going through the wormhole, chasing down that ship and blowing it to hell, before it could escape and warn their entire society that this wormhole was a trap. Not only would we lose the ability to use this wormhole as a bagel slicer, but the Maxolhx would also use precautions before transiting any wormhole. Yes, the best possible action was for us to destroy that ship. Unfortunately, we couldn’t do that, which is why we were using a wormhole as a bagel slicer. Our only realistic option was to jump the Dutchman away, after we flew to a safe distance from the event horizon. “Can we-”

  “No, Joe, it is not running away! It is coming through the wormhole at maximum thrust, coming toward us! It will be here before the Dutchman can get out to a safe jump distance!”

  “Shit!” I fought down a wave of panic. Elder wormholes projected a damping field around their event horizons, to avoid ships creating jump wormholes that would interfere with their operation. “Pilot! Take us out to jump distance! Desai, get our-”

  “Too late, Sir,” Desai called from the CIC. “That ship is coming through, its weapons are hot! As soon as their sensors reset, we are in big trouble. We should- no! It has launched missiles from the other side of the wormhole!”

  Helplessly, I watched the main display. A volley of five, six, no, seven missiles came through first, their booster drive plumes
trailing fiery streaks of incandescent particles behind them. As they cleared the event horizon on our side, the missiles spread out, seeking a target. The sensors of those missiles were blind from passage through the wormhole, but that wouldn’t last long. Each missile had a stealth field, which could not be engaged until the effects of spatial distortion wore off, and with their booster engines firing a stealth field would be useless. If we authorized our point-defense cannons to engage the missiles, they would pinpoint our location much sooner, but we had to kill them before they turned their boosters off and wrapped themselves in stealth fields.

  The Merry Band of Pirates is a kick-ass troop of monkeys, even our current skeleton crew. Without me having to issue an order, Desai authorized the PDS cannons to engage on full-auto mode. Even from my command chair on the bridge, deep inside the Dutchman’s forward hull, I could hear and feel the maser cannons chattering as they cycled in rapid-fire mode. Skippy had enhanced the sensors, software and processing speed of the PDS computers, but the upgrades really were not needed. With the booster drive plumes of the target missiles lighting them up like flares, our point-defense cannons were knocking missiles out of the sky almost faster than I could keep track. Within seconds, there were only two missiles left, and-

  “Joe you idiot!” Skippy shouted. “Cease fire, cease fi- Ah, it’s too late,” he groaned as the last missile was exploded by our cannons. “Stupid monkeys! The Maxolhx wanted us to do that, they’re conducting recon by fire and you fell for that trick, you idiot. When we shot back, their missiles relayed their targeting data back through the wormhole, now that ship knows exactly where we are! I could have- Oh shit, here it comes!”

  On the main display, I saw the nose of the enemy ship emerge from the chaotic backscatter of the event horizon. I did not see the ship’s bow in profile, I saw it straight-on. Skippy was right, it was headed straight for us. As more of the ship raced through the wormhole, I had a brief impression of a flare of light, then the Dutchman rocked as we were struck by a directed-energy weapon or particle beam.

  I could not allow the ship to be captured, or even scanned at close-range. With my last remaining moment of life, I flipped up the cover over the self-destruct button and –

  And the Maxolhx ship exploded. There was a blinding flash of light before the main display damped down the image. The wormhole’s event horizon winked out, and suddenly the Dutchman was alone.

  Then we got hit by the blast wave.

  My teeth rattled as the ship rocked, yawing around as the pilots fired thrusters, trying to point the ship’s nose toward the wave of high-energy particles and debris. We would take hits on the nose, but that part of the ship had the thickest armor of the forward hull, and the energy shields there overlapped so they were extra strong. There was nothing in the star carrier’s nose that we couldn’t replace or live without, and the pilots were following well-practiced procedures to minimize damage.

  The blast wave washed over us quickly, even the biggest remaining chunks were traveling a decent percentage of lightspeed. The main bridge display flickered, changing to a schematic of the ship. “Colonel Bishop,” Nagatha reported. “The ship has sustained multiple debris strikes. None of the damage appears to be critical. Forward sensors are offline, I am sending bots to survey the damage. I strongly recommend we do not jump or maneuver, until I have more complete data.”

  “Got it, will do. What was our radiation exposure?”

  “Sections of the forward hull are hot, they were bombarded by high-energy photons. That radiation has a brief half-life, the forward hull should be safe within sixteen hours. There is no need for humans to enter that part of the ship.”

  She was right, the star carrier’s nose was packed with equipment, there were no living quarters up there. “Understood. Pilots, stand down but remain alert. Nagatha, why isn’t Skippy helping to survey the damage?”

  “He is presently very busy, talking with the wormhole network about the incident.”

  Damn, I thought. If Skippy was too busy to speak with a monkey, the network must be overwhelming even his incredible processors. “Nagatha, what happened? Why did that ship explode? Where did the wormhole go?”

  “You will have to ask Skippy,” she replied. Even she was distracted. “I truly do not know. It all happened very fast, my focus was on feeding guidance data to the point-defense system.”

  “Hey, Joe,” Skippy spoke. He sounded tired, which shouldn’t be possible.

  “What just happened?” I demanded.

  “Joe, you just witnessed pure, unadulterated, one hundred percent Grade-A awesomeness, that’s what.” His energy level picked up as he bragged about himself.

  “Yeah, I know that,” I sputtered. The reason I said that was both because I had no idea how we were still alive, and because he was going to tell me he was awesome no matter what he did. “What happened?”

  “Joe, what happened was that those rotten kitties just learned a valuable lesson.”

  “Like what?”

  He changed his voice, to sound like John Wayne. “Never bring a starship to a wormhole fight.”

  “Ha! I, ha!” I began laughing, and couldn’t stop. It was hysterical laughter. It was the laughter of relief and surprise at being alive. The pilots and people in the CIC joined me, all of us celebrating the fact that we weren’t dead. When I was able to talk again, I wiped my eyes with the back of one sleeve. “Skippy, you truly are awesome beyond the ability of any meatsack to comprehend. Please forgive us for not being able to truly appreciate the full majesty of your magnificence.”

  “Hmmph,” he sniffed. “That praise is inadequate, but I suppose it will have to do.”

  “I thank you for accepting my humble praise. What did you do?”

  “It was easy, Joe. Although, if you want the truth,” he paused, leaving me hanging.

  “I do want the truth.”

  “You can’t handle the truth!” He shouted in his best Jack Nicolson impression. “Oh man,” he chuckled. “I’ve been waiting for an opportunity to do that. Ok, here’s the deal. What I did was so clever of me, it approaches monkey-brain level thinking.”

  Holy shit, I thought. Did he just compliment humanity? Wisely, I kept my mouth shut and let him talk.

  “The network was still responding to my request for control, and it wasn’t going to grant me access until it was too late. So, I knew the wormhole was the only possible weapon we had available, that could possibly have a chance to stop that ship. The question was, how to get the wormhole to crush that ship? So, I thought; I need to make the wormhole see that ship as a threat to itself.”

  “How can a starship be dangerous to a wormhole?” That puzzled me. “You said even a nuke could not damage an Elder wormhole.”

  “You are correct that usually, no starship existing today should be able to threaten an Elder wormhole. However, I know something the Maxolhx don’t. I know how a starship recently broke a wormhole. The Flying Dutchman ship did that. My clever idea was to fool the wormhole’s sensors into thinking that Maxolhx ship was trying to jump through it, like we did. The network, of course, updated its protocols after we jumped through a wormhole, so doing that is impossible. But the network doesn’t know that, I mean, it thought that was impossible the first time. I fooled the network into thinking that ship had somehow bypassed the protocols, so the wormhole smashed that ship to bits to protect itself. It reached out and crushed it, by compressing local spacetime around it. Then the ship exploded. Pretty smart, huh?”

  “Holy shit, Skippy, that was pretty damned clever. I don’t know if I would ever have thought of doing that.”

  “Really, Joe?”

  “For realz, Skippy.”

  “Wow. Now that is worthwhile praise. Although praising me for thinking like a monkey is kind of a mixed blessing, you know?”

  “I get that. Ok, so, what went wrong?”

  “Why do you think anything went wrong?” He asked, his voice squeaky. “Certainly I did not do anything wrong.”
r />   “Then why does your voice sound like a four-year-old girl?”

  “Damn it,” he grunted. “Ok, so maybe it is possible that I forgot something. This is, heh heh, kind of funny, when you think about it.”

  “What the hell did you do?”

  “Well, Joe, it’s more like what I did not do. Or what I forgot to do, if you want to get technical about it.”

  “Get to the point, beer can.”

  “Ok, fine. Remember how I tapped into the wormhole’s sensor data feed, to see what was on the other side? Well, heh heh, apparently in addition to telling the network to transmit the data to me, I also need to tell the damned thing to shut off the feed. That is not a problem before the event horizon emerges here, because until that point, the data feed is transmitted through higher dimensions not available to the Maxolhx. However, and no way could I have known this- really, I am the victim here, because the stupid network should have warned me. Man, I am going to send a sternly-worded letter to the network, about how it-”

  “Skippy? The point, please?”

  “Here’s the deal. Once a wormhole is stable, the data feed begins transmitting in local spacetime, and the feed is two-way. It goes to both ends of the wormhole. Normally, the data feed goes through higher dimensions of spacetime and is essentially invisible. But, I requested the data to be fed to the Flying Dutchman, so the signal went through local spacetime. The Maxolhx ship picked up the feed. That is how the target ship knew we were here.”

  “Ok,” I puffed out a long breath while I thought. “In the future, you can turn off the data feed, just before the wormhole emerges?”

  “Um, I think so. We had better test it. Like, when we see there isn’t a ship waiting on the other side, I will instruct the wormhole to open here, and try cutting off the data feed. Joe, I can’t promise the stupid network won’t do some other dumbass thing. It is not very cooperative.”