He arched an eyebrow. “If there is a next time. Skippy told me he is unsure how many times he can use your bagel slicer,” his lips curled upward in the ghost of a smile, “trick again. He expects the network will block his access to that feature at some point, it may already have done so. He also told me that he had no way of knowing whether the network will refuse to cooperate in the future.”
“Yeah,” I leaned back in my chair. Originally, Skippy had thought the network would give him a scolding about abusing his authority in an action that had the potential to damage an ancient Elder wormhole. We would then know that he couldn’t use that trick again. Now, he feared the situation was much worse. The network was not communicating with him, other than to respond to direct inquiries. We might have a situation where a target ship was coming through the wormhole, and the network right then decided to refuse Skippy’s command to close the event horizon. That would be a disaster; the Flying Dutchman would be practically on top of a fully-capable senior-species warship. We could not even jump away, because we had to keep the ship close to the wormhole, so the assault teams had only a short exposure while they flew across the gap between ships.
Not knowing whether the network would accept Skippy’s bagel-slicer command again was a major, major problem that we had no way of solving. Every time we used the bagel-slicer, we increased the risk of the network cutting off his access to that feature. We had to fly blind, or cancel the operation. “I don’t know that we have any other option than to continue.”
“There is one other option, Sir,” he reminded me. A muscle in his jaw twitched as he spoke. He didn’t like the idea any better than I did. The difference is, if I ordered him to proceed with a bad idea, his duty would be to make it happen.
“No, there is not. We discussed this. Hell, Smythe, you told me that plan is bollocks.”
“I did, at the time,” he agreed. What he meant was, in planning the assault op, I had asked whether we could keep the Dutchman at a safe distance from the wormhole, while the assault teams waited in stealthed dropships closer to the event horizon. If disaster struck, the cluster of dropships could be self-destructed by a pair of our tactical nukes, and the Dutchman could jump away. That alternative plan had been my idea, and even I hated it. Smythe, and Giraud and others, had pointed out to me that the assault teams needed the close-support of the Dutchman’s maser cannons, to suppress fire from the target. From a distance of even a half lightsecond away, the time lag could render our fire support ineffective. More importantly, Skippy needed to be close to the target ship, so he could scan and create a model of the enemy ship’s control AI. Half a lightsecond did not sound very far, but it was over ninety thousand freakin’ miles. That was too far away for Skippy to have confidence about performing his patented awesomeness, so that idea was out. “Since then,” Smythe continued, “I have thought about that option again. We could take Skippy with us in the dropships, to-”
“Hey!” The avatar appeared instantly. “You monkeys go do all the crazy shit, I plan on staying right here where it is safe and warm.”
“We can’t risk Skippy being captured,” I added.
“There is no risk of capture,” Smythe noted. “The nukes will turn our dropships into subatomic particles, and hopefully cripple the enemy ship, but Skippy will not be damaged.” He peered at the avatar, his eyes narrowing. “Is that correct?”
“Yeah. I am not looking forward to being in a nuclear barbeque, but it won’t damage me. I will go flying off into space.”
“Yes, and when the time is safe, you can signal the Dutchman to retrieve you.”
“For what?’ I asked. “If you trigger the nukes, we will lose the entire STAR team and our best dropships. We won’t be able to do anything other than fly around, until the Dutchman wears out.”
“You have other dropships,” Smythe casually picked an imaginary piece of lint off his uniform. “Including the dropships aboard the target ship we already secured. As we discussed, there is the possibility of recruiting military personnel from Paradise, to replace our losses of soldiers and pilots.”
I puffed out my cheeks. “That is a very last resort. Even if we could get qualified people, it would take months to bring them up to speed. We are committing the entire STAR team to this op, there wouldn’t be anyone left aboard to train recruits.”
“There are the seriously wounded people, Sir,” he observed, looking at me closely to gauge my reaction. “They will recover. They have knowledge and experience, and they will be remaining aboard the ship.”
“I don’t see that as an option. By the time we retrieved Skippy, recruited a new assault team and trained them up, the Maxolhx would have learned they have one or more warships missing. They would start assigning escorts to all ships, and we’d be screwed.”
“That only makes the mission more difficult, not impossible,” he flashed another tight smile, knowing that the Merry Band of Pirates had accomplished many impossible things. “The alternative is unthinkable. We can’t give up.”
“Oh, hell, Smythe,” I ran a hand through my hair. “You really are planning for the apocalypse, aren’t you?”
“You have designated this mission as ‘Operation Armageddon’,” he gave me that raised eyebrow again. “We must consider the worst case.”
Shit. He was right about that. If we couldn’t stop a Maxolhx battlegroup from reaching Earth, it would be Armageddon for our home planet. You know what was the worst part about the prospect of our world and everyone we loved there being burnt to a radioactive cinder, and knowing it was my fault? The worst part was, I had to keep fighting anyway. We all did. If we lost Earth, we had to fall back to Avalon and do what we could to ensure the survival of our species. That was our duty, damn it. “I hear you. We’re not doing it. The only reason you would trigger the nukes is if the network refuses to do the bagel-slicer thing again. Once we lose the bagel-slicer, we are dead in the water, no matter whether we can replace our losses or not.”
“That is not true, Sir,” he chided me.
“It’s not?” That made me pause. “You know something I don’t?”
“I know that, as long as you have your inventive imagination and Skippy, there is always the possibility of success.”
“Smythe,” I rubbed hands down my face. “I’m under enough pressure already. My imagination barely got us here,” I jabbed a finger on the desk. “My clever-ideas tank is empty now. I appreciate the wisdom of keeping the Dutchman out of harm’s way, so we can fight again.”
“Not just to fight again, Sir. If there truly is no way to stop the Maxolhx battlegroup, you have already defined our fallback plan; to bring as many people as you can from Paradise to Avalon.”
Shit. Was he right? “This is a judgment call,” I said, mostly to myself. By risking the Dutchman, I had all our chips on the table. If our only starship were lost, humanity would be staring at nothing but a vacant expanse of felt on the table, out of options. “My gut tells me it feels wrong,” I finally said, after a pause that had become awkwardly long. “No. We continue with the op as planned.” With my hands, I pretended I had a stack of poker chips, and pushed them to the center of the desk. “We are all-in,” I announced.
“Very well, Sir,” he said with an expression I could not read. That reminded me never to play poker against Jeremy Smythe. “Then, there is another matter we should discuss.”
“Which is?” I groaned.
“Skippy informed me that our supply of medical nanomachines is sufficient for either healing the seriously wounded, or, for bringing the less badly injured people back to full combat readiness.”
“Shit,” that time I said the curse word aloud. “Let me guess; you want to put the hard cases on hold. Damn it, all three of them have lost limbs. One of them may still die if we can’t repair his internal injuries. I have to tell them that is too bad, because we need the meds to fix someone else’s sprained ankle?”
“Just so, Sir.” Again, I could not read his blank expression.
“No, Sir. All three of the people in the sickbay are refusing further medical treatment, until the assault team is combat ready. They have already made the call.”
“What?” My head jerked back. “Because you pressured them to do that?”
“No, because they are professionals and they are committed to the mission.”
I opened my mouth, closed it, and thought hard. No matter how nicely Smythe said it, our three seriously wounded soldiers were under pressure to give the precious meds to the more able-bodied operators. They knew what their fellow STARs thought. That was unfair.
Crap. Life is unfair. Smythe was right. Because I had decided to continue the mission, I had to deal with the consequences. We were down three operators, making the condition of the remaining team even more critical. I had to give the people who were putting boots on the deck the best chance they had, and the way to do that was to give them miracle nanomeds to bring their bodies back up to full combat readiness. “Tell me something, Smythe. Do you ever get tired of being right?”
“I don’t expect so, considering the alternative. Being wrong gets people killed.”
“Sometimes, I really hate this job. Skippy, there are medicines aboard the ship we captured, right? Can we use them?”
“The Maxolhx have extremely sophisticated medical technology, that is true. However, modifying their equipment for human physiology will take weeks, at least.”
“You can’t just,” I flipped a hand, “rewrite the software?”
“No, Joe,” his avatar shook its head. “Most of Maxolhx technology utilizes firmware, the instruction sets are resident in the physical layer. It is complicated. Please believe that I am already making my best effort to adapt their technology so we can use and control it. The process is more difficult and intricate than I anticipated. Unless you wish to delay the mission possibly for a month, nanomeds will not be available.”
“That’s no good,” I pounded a fist on the desk. “The Maxolhx will be alerted that their ships are disappearing by then. We have to go now. All right, I will go talk with the people in sickbay.”
“That is not necessary, Sir,” Smythe announced gently.
“Yes it is,” I insisted. “It’s my decision to deny them the meds they need, they deserve to hear it from me directly.” I was not certain whether I was making the right decisions, but there was one thing I was absolutely certain about.
I did not deserve the honor of commanding this crew.
Walking into the galley, I saw Adams standing with her back to me. Not trusting myself at that moment, I ducked back into the passageway and took several breaths to put on my official US Army Colonel persona. During the boarding operation, Adams had been in serious trouble, and I was still dealing with putting her life in danger. If she saw that I was treating her differently because, well, because she is Margaret Adams, she would not be happy with me. I needed to be professional, and show her the same level of concern I felt about anyone in the crew.
Except I was not feeling that way at all.
“Adams,” I said as I walked back into the galley. She had just set her tray down at a table and was pulling out a chair.
“Yes, Sir. I used your,” she pantomimed holding a rifle, then flipping it around backwards. “Signature move on him.”
“My move?” I asked, then understanding clicked in my slow brain. “Oh. Using a rifle as a club?”
She grinned but the gesture faded immediately from her face. Adams was the only person with me when I used a rifle to beat a Kristang guard to a bloody mess, years ago when we escaped from jail on Paradise. That was not a fond memory for either of us, and she had recently done basically the same thing to a Maxolhx warrior.
I lowered my voice. “You Ok, Gunny?”
“Squared away. It was, intense. I’m sore,” she rolled her shoulders stiffly. “That’s all.”
“Have you been to sickbay?”
“Doctor Skippy did what he could for me,” she nodded, her eyes glancing to the food on her tray.
I took the hint. My purpose for coming to the galley had been to get lunch, but it would be awkward eating with her a few tables away, and there were already other people seated at her table. Plus, I had just come from speaking with the wounded in sickbay, and I didn’t have much of an appetite. Instead, I pour a glass of iced tea, took it to my office, and tried to find something useful to do.
It would have been nice to wait until the STAR team was fully recovered, before we took on the task of trying to capture another ship, but we didn’t have a choice. That second battlecruiser was coming, and we had to be ready for it. No way could we risk letting that juicy warship go, and the crew knew it. Boarding and capturing the first ship had been a tough fight, very tough, and the crew was mentally prepared for another desperate struggle that devolved into hand-to-hand combat. Skippy thought this second boarding operation would be easier, because he had learned a lot from examining the first ship.
So, we got the STAR team patched up as best, and they waited for the ‘Go’ order as before. I hated to send Adams back into combat. This second time would be worse, I feared, because she was already banged up. She would also be going in as infantry, because there weren’t enough combots left. With the injuries to her left shoulder and arm, she was not confident she could properly control a combot, so she insisted someone else act as combot operator, while she spotted for and defended that person.
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
Fortune either smiled at us, or was eager to see us die quickly, depending on how you looked at it. Two hours after the STAR team got buttoned up in the suits, sitting in dropships that were ready for immediate launch, Skippy announced he had detected an Extinction-class battlecruiser, traveling by itself, approaching the wormhole.
This time, instead us positioning the Dutchman behind the event horizon, we placed the ship in front of where the wormhole would emerge, and we were flying toward it at four thousand kilometers an hour. Skippy warned us the timing would be tricky, as if that were anything new to the Merry Band of Pirates.
Right on schedule, a battlecruiser came through the wormhole, this time without any warning that we were waiting on the other side. Skippy used the wormhole to slice through the enemy ship, and on the displays we saw a forward hull section that was slightly smaller than the one we had captured, spinning end over end. “Ha!” Skippy shouted. “I sliced that sucker exactly where I wanted! Damn, I should be cutting diamonds.”
“Screw that,” I felt like choking him. In the CIC, the crew was firing weapons to knock out the enemy ship’s defenses, so it couldn’t interfere with us. “If you don’t get that damned wormhole open and stable fast, this is going to be a real short trip!”
“Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled, no doubt peeved that we didn’t have time to fawn over his latest accomplishment. “I’m on it.”
While the Dutchman’s maser cannons were knocking out defensive systems of the ship we had sliced through, we were still in substantial danger. The aft part of the enemy’s hull, the engineering section that contained the stuff we needed to make a ship go and fight, was on the other side of a wormhole that was shut down. Skippy was working to get the wormhole open again, and the timing was critical. We were moving four thousand kilometers per hour, toward a target that didn’t exist yet. It was possible the wormhole network would lock Skippy out, or delay responding to his commands. Any delay might be fatal, because plunging through a wormhole before the event horizons were stable was a sure-fire recipe for turning our ship into a short-lived cloud of exotic particles.
On the main display, I saw the pinpoint of a wormhole emerge, then it rapidly expanded. “Got it!” Skippy announced with smug satisfaction. “And you doubted me, Joe. Shame on you,” he scolded. “Um, oopsy.”
“Oopsy?”
“Er, the wormhole is stabilizing a lot slower than normal, probably because of-”
“Reed!” I roared. “Full reverse!”<
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“On it,” she said tightly without looking back at me, and I felt the ship shudder as the reactionless normal-space engines strained. The old Dutchman had a lot less mass than her original star carrier configuration, but she was never a sports car. Reed had been maneuvering the ship already to line up with the slightly unpredictable location of the wormhole, all she had to do was flick a thumb to throw the engines into full reverse.
We were still moving too fast.
“When will the damn thing be stable enough to-”
My question was cut off by a warning from Reed. “Sir, we can’t slow down or turn hard enough to miss it. We are either going in, or getting sliced up by the edge.”
“Keep us lined up with the center,” I ordered. At least if we were destroyed by a chaotic wormhole, we wouldn’t leave any evidence behind. “Skippy?”
“All I can say is, it’s going to be close. I think we’re good?” He added with a squeal that did not fill me with confidence. “I can’t tell because the stupid wormhole isn’t talking to me!”
The main display gave me a jarring glimpse of something gray in the blackness of interstellar space, as we flashed past the ship Skippy had just sliced apart. I got a brief impression of a light flare as the Dutchman’s maser cannon struck some undefended target on the enemy’s hull, then the display focused on the still-flickering disc of the wormhole dead ahead of us. A stable wormhole glows rather than flickering, but this one was still twisting spacetime to lock down its connection.
Just before the Flying Dutchman plunged into the event horizon, moving more than a kilometer every second, we launched two missiles from our stern tubes, to fly backwards along our path. The last glimpse we got of them, before the wormhole swallowed us, showed those missiles running hot, straight and normal.
We all silently wished them the best of luck.
And said a prayer for ourselves.
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