Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

For years, Thelma and Louise had rested in secure racks, in a cargo bay aboard the Flying Dutchman, doing absolutely nothing, other than slowly decaying over their half-lives of eighty-eight years. Their lives were dull, dull, dull, with the only highlight being when their hated companion Mister Nukey was taken away on secret missions by the humans. Nukey disappeared for varying lengths of time, only to return without comment. No matter how strongly the other tactical nuclear weapons begged, cajoled or outright demanded, that big jerk Nukey had refused to disclose any details of his incredible adventures. Maddeningly, all he did was hint that his adventures were, in fact, incredible beyond the imaginations of his companions. He insisted that he could not say any more, due to the highly classified nature of said incredible adventures, and he hoped they all understood. The smirk on his casing was unbearable.

  Thus, the other nuclear devices were left to stew in their jealous anger, grumbling amongst each other and gleefully imagining horrible fates for Nukey. Their only pleasure was giggling about imagined humiliations for that traitorous, privileged jerk. Why was he so special, they asked each other. Was his plutonium more potent, more pure than theirs? No! They all came from the same reactor, the same processing facility. So, why had they been relegated to sitting uselessly, while Nukey went on joyous adventures across the galaxy?

  Nukey had not explained. Until one day, when he hinted that the issue was not him being special, it was more than the others were, well, he hated to say it. Inadequate, was the nicest way to say it.

  Thelma, Louise and the other nuclear weapons could not have hated anyone with more passion, after the day Nukey smugly hinted they were somehow deficient.

  When Mister Nukey went away for what was apparently the final time, he had been rather quickly followed by two other warheads who had formal names, but were called Beavis and Butthead by the other devices. Those two misfit morons, who were totally undeserving of the opportunity, thumbed their noses and jeered at the others as they were carted away, never to be heard from again.

  Thelma, Louise and the remaining seven other devices had filed a protest under the Nuclear Device Equal Opportunity Act, which was, sadly, ignored. Of the three replacement devices who came aboard at Earth, two joined the lawsuit, while Fred, of course, said that well, you know, we’ll have to see about that, and there was no reason to be hasty about it.

  The other nine warheads were sure that, if it ever came time for Fred to blow something up, he would be a dud just like his personality.

  Thelma and Louise were at first suspicious, then thrilled beyond belief, when humans came into the cargo bay and lifted the two warheads with slings, to place them on a sturdy cart. The humans had bypassed Fred, who was on the top rack closest to the door where Nukey used to rest, and that blew the theory that asshole had been selected for missions purely for convenience.

  Louise was super excited, and Thelma had to caution that their first excursion out of the cargo bay could be nothing more than a routine inspection. If that were true, and they were returned to their racks in the cargo bay, both of them would have suffered fatal equipment breakdowns due to broken hearts.

  First Thelma, then Louise, were loaded into the nosecones of old but serviceable Thuranin hyper-velocity missiles, while they held their breath and did not dare hope. This could all just be a test, Thelma warned, while Louise quivered with excitement. You just wait, Thelma moaned, we will be taken back to our dull cargo bay soon enough.

  Thelma held her composure even as the missile’s powercells were energized, when umbilical cables were retracted, when guidance control was transferred to the missile’s tiny brain, even when the outer door of the launch tube was opened. It is all just a test, a tease, she told herself, while inside, her trigger mechanism was heating up. Don’t fall for this trick, she told herself, refusing to allow the cruel humans to tease her. She trembled with anticipation even while feeling sorry for Louise, who was bound to be crushed by disappointment. Thelma prepared for her own hopes to be crushed, right up to the moment when the missile launch tube’s railgun mechanism slammed the missile out at over three thousand gees of acceleration.

  “Yeehaaaaaaaa!” Thelma exulted in unison with Louise. Both warheads were jostled by nauseating twists and turns as the missiles turned to line up on their targets, then bored in at full military thrust. With enemy defenses down, there was no need for the usual infuriating delays while the missiles jinked wildly to avoid particle cannons. No, these two missiles flew hot, straight and normal, and they flew side by side, nearly close enough to touch. To maximize the explosive effect of the warheads, they would detonate simultaneously within meters of each other.

  The target in front of them was a formidable Maxolhx battlecruiser- Or, it had been a battlecruiser and had been formidable. Now it appeared to be drifting dead in space. The sensors of the missiles reported that main power was off inside the ship, but backup systems were slowly coming back online, which could be dangerous.

  Oh, Thelma assured her missile’s brain with a soft laugh, don’t you worry. We will take care of that nonsense right quick.

  As the missiles plunged over a severed sponson and fell toward the center of the hull, they extended magnetic fields to lock each other together as they raced toward their destiny.

  Their last “Whoohooooo” was cut off by the joyous fire of fusing tritium, and nuclear fireballs consumed the unprotected battlecruiser.

  “We’re alive?” I asked stupidly, because of course we were, or I couldn’t have said anything. My real unspoken question was ‘how’? So, I spoke it out loud. “How is that possible?”

  “I’ll explain later,” Skippy answered quickly. “We have work to do first. Nuclear detonations behind us, confirmed by sensor feed,” Skippy reported. “Target destroyed.”

  “Uh, great,” I acknowledged without thinking about it. At no point had I been concerned that our nukes would fail us. My focus was on getting the Dutchman through the wormhole, then capturing the engineering section of the battlecruiser. The mystery of how we survived was eating at me, but I shoved my curiosity to the back of my mind and focused on things I could control. “Did this aft section blow up like the other one?”

  “No,” Skippy sounded both pleased and surprised. “It’s intact! We have a prize to capture.”

  “Outstanding,” I said automatically. “Launch the boarding teams. Identify targets of opportunity and fire at will.” We had to pinpoint defensive cannons on the prize, so we could take them out before they engaged the assault team’s dropships.

  “Dropships away,” Nagatha announced, as on the main display, I saw dots zip away from the ship at high speed.

  I said another prayer, this time for them.

  Jeremy Smythe couldn’t stop a strained breath from escaping his lips, as the Falcon shot out of the docking bay. The sound of a grunt would have been acceptable, but they had launched just as he was inhaling a deep breath, and it was squeezed from his lungs in a sound that was more like a squeal. Despite needing to concentrate on tensing the right muscles so he didn’t black out from the acceleration, he listened for any amused laughter, because his helmet microphone was open to the common channel.

  Either no one had noticed or they were dealing with their own struggles, because the channel was admirably silent other than the labored breathing of his team and the two pilots. Instinctively, he gripped the seat handles a bit tighter as the Falcon cut thrust and skewed around sickeningly in a move his eyes found difficult to follow. Up front, somehow the pilots knew what they were doing, though they had to be suffering from the same tunnel vision. The thrust kicked on again, perhaps harder than before, and he knew they were decelerating to match speed with the prize. With darkness encroaching on his peripheral vision, he moved his eyes to monitor the vital signs of the team in the ship, one person at a time. They were all coping as best he could expect. All were following protocol and none had heartrates higher than his own. The overall fitness of the assault team would not be an issue, other than the ac
hes and pains from previous injuries. His own left shoulder felt stiff from the burden of high gee load, he would take care to favor it when he could.

  The Falcon jerked to the right, the pilots must be lining up to intercept a landing zone on the prize, where they could latch on. The team was as prepared as they could be, given the time constraints and their small numbers. The first assault had been a chaotic mess of terror and savage fighting. Even if they captured the prize with all its vital systems intact, they still needed at least one more ship before-

  Thrust suddenly cut off. Smythe tensed for a sudden and violent maneuver, assuming the enemy had restored sensors quickly enough to target the incoming dropships with particle beam cannons or missiles. The pilots were being foolish, he knew. When you found yourself in a kill zone, the only way to survive was to get closer to the enemy as quickly as possible, get inside their defensive perimeter where they could not hit-

  But the Falcon was not twisting radically in any direction. Thrust had come back on, gently. “Bloody hell,” he gasped. “What is-”

  Skippy’s voice interrupted him. “Why, hello Jeremy, old chum.”

  “You do not call me ‘Jeremy’,” he said as he tasted blood in his mouth from a burst blood vessel in his nose. “And we are not chums. Sitrep.”

  “It’s simple, and good news for a change. I was precise about where I sliced up that ship, but, eh, maybe a bit too conservative. It has all the major systems we need for power generation and propulsion, that sort of thing, which-”

  “Get to the point.”

  “Right. You are rather hasty today,” he sniffed. “The oppo on the prize,” he said ‘oppo’ instead of ‘opposition’ because he thought that’s what the cool kids did. “Consisted of only four kitties, and only one survived. Much of the engineering section is off-limits to biologicals,” he explained with disdain.

  “We only have a single Maxolhx to deal with?” Smythe asked, astonished.

  “Huh? No. Didn’t I explain that? The survivor was in an access corridor near the skin of the hull, in an area that was protected against radiation, but thinly armored. The Dutchman took that kitty out with a maser cannon shot, punched right through the hull. Better not count on that happening again, huh? Your team has no opposition. Well, you won’t, until the backup systems aboard the prize reboot. Anyway, there is no point in crushing your team with heavy gees, so the dropships are coming in carefully. I have sent a list of suggested objectives to your suit, in order of priority.”

  “A holiday in the park, hmm?” Smythe reviewed the objectives shown on the inside of his visor, already mentally dividing up assignments amongst his team.

  “Oh, certainly, gov’nor,” Skippy agreed in an exaggerated English accent. “Why, just pop over there, and, Bob’s your uncle, the prize will be ours.”

  “Bob’s your uncle, eh? I notice that you will not be coming with us,” Smythe noted dryly.

  “Oh, no chance of that nonsense,” he laughed heartily. “Well, you monkeys have fun.”

  “That’s it?” I asked, intensely skeptical that Skippy had forgotten something important. “No one is alive over there? You’re sure there isn’t a team of kitty commandos hidden in a stealthed armory, where your scans can’t penetrate.”

  “I am sure, dumdum. There isn’t anything over there feeding enough power to power a stealth field. Besides, while the reactors were operating, they would interfere with a stealth field. I very much doubt the designers of that ship included a stealthed armory, just in case the ship got sliced apart by a wormhole. You moron.”

  “Yes, but-”

  “And, as I told you already, that ship is an Extinction-class battlecruiser, almost identical to the one we captured. I know the exact layout of that ship, and I sliced into it just aft of the armory in that section. There are no hidden surprises.”

  “So, that’s it?” I waited for the other shoe to drop. “We got lucky?”

  “No, of course not. What you call luck is just the awesomeness of me. I knew the aft section of the ship would not have many kitties, but I was very conservative about where I cut. If we get another shot at using the bagel slicer, I will cut a bit more forward. There are missile magazines, a pair of docking bays, and other gear we could use, if I cut in a less conservative location.”

  “I will consider it. You need to show me your plan.”

  “No problemo, Joe. The first two assault teams have latched on, and are accessing an airlock now. To answer the question you haven’t asked; yes. Yes, I can use this section to make the prize we previously captured a real functioning warship. We should get at least one more, so I can use those Lego pieces to build a ship that is better than it was.”

  “Well, shit, Skippy. Thank you. You are awesome.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Now, since we aren’t busy-”

  “Hey! I am busy!” He protested.

  “Yeah, but your ginormous brain can multi-task. Tell me how we survived going through that wormhole. Was it more stable than it looked?”

  “Um, no. We kind of dodged a bullet there, Joe, if you want the truth.”

  “When do I ever not want the truth?”

  “Good point, Joe, and those pants do not at all make you look fat,” he chuckled.

  “Can you get back to the point, please?”

  “Sure. Especially because this story is all about the awesomeness of me. When I realized the ship was going through the wormhole whether we wanted to or not, I considered my options. First, I thought of asking the duty officer to eject my escape pod-”

  “You what?”

  “Come on, Joe, it was a logical option. But, as you can see, I didn’t do that.”

  “Because you didn’t want to go on without us?”

  “Uh, more like I didn’t want to be stranded by myself in deep space until the end of time. But we should go with the thing you said, if it makes me look better.”

  “Asshole. Keep going.”

  “I won’t bore you with all the options I thought of, and discarded as impractical. What happened is, I couldn’t think of any way to avoid having the ship go through the wormhole. I did try to shut it down at the last second while it was still unstable, but the network refused because that would have damaged the wormhole. So, I tried to imagine a way for the ship to survive going through while the connection was still chaotic.”

  “Cool. How did you do that?”

  His voice came through my earpiece instead of the bridge speakers. Whatever he was going to say, he didn’t want anyone else to hear it. “Um, well, the truth is, I didn’t.”

  Before saying anything, because anything I said was guaranteed to be stupid, I stopped to think. When I spoke, it was in a whisper. “The wormhole was more stable than you thought?”

  “No.”

  “How many questions do I get before you are sick of my moronic guesses, and just tell me what happened?”

  “I am already sick of your questions. Um, this is really complicated.”

  “Is it going to give me a gigantic headache?”

  “No headache, because your monkey head will freakin’ explode when I explain what happened. Joe, the scary truth is, the ship did not make it through the wormhole. It was torn apart as it contacted the unstable event horizon. Uh!” He shushed me. “Let me explain, dumdum. Just before we hit the event horizon, I hacked the wormhole’s sensor feed. I sent false data back, showing that the Dutchman was wrapped in a bubble of stable spacetime, so it could survive going through before the wormhole was fully stable.”

  “You can do that spacetime bubble thing?”

  “No. Well, yes, but I can’t create a big enough to cover the whole ship. It was all bullshit, but the network had to believe its own sensors.”

  “Holy sh- Then, then we’re not real? This,” I gestured around the bridge, “is a simulation?”

  “Simulation?”

  “Yes. The real Joe Bishop died, and what I think is me now, is really just a simulation inside your matrix?”r />
  “Oh for- No, you dumdum. You did not take the red pill. Ugh, if I created a simulation of Joe Bishop, you wouldn’t still smell like someone sprayed a dumpster with a whole can of Axe body spray. Also, the idea of you being inside my matrix? Ewwww, yuck.”

  “Skippy, if I’m still alive and the ship is still here, you got some ‘splainin’ to do.”

  “Ok, try to keep up, please. The network believed the Dutchman entered the wormhole safely, so if it did not come out the other end, the network would consider that a violation of causality. To avoid that, it sort of reset the game clock to a probability in which the Dutchman really did survive.”

  The top of my head did not physically explode, but it felt like it. “How would that violate this cause thing?”

  “Causality, Joe. Cause, followed by effect. You drop a pen, then it hit the floor. Got it? Listen, Elder wormholes have an ‘A’ end and a ‘B’ end, you understand that?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “The A and B ends are temporarily connected, across many lightyears, when the wormhole is open. But the A and B ends are separate constructs, separate mechanisms. That is how I am able to make the network connect the A end of one wormhole, to the A or B end of another wormhole. I hacked the data feed, so the ‘A’ end reported the Dutchman went in successfully. The network knew it had to come out the ‘B’ end, no matter how unlikely that was.”

  Very slowly, I asked “The network created an alternate Universe for us?”

  “No, Joe, that would take too much energy. The arrow of entropy points in only one direction. Well, there are exceptions to that rule, but I can’t get into that now. What the network did was just to collapse probability sets in a small bubble of local spacetime on the ‘B’ end. That limited the amount of energy required. There are infinite probable Universes in which the Dutchman was destroyed. We are the result of a very unlikely, but still possible, outcome in which the ship survived. Boy,” he chuckled. “If the network ever finds out that I screwed with it, I am in huh-YUGE trouble. Hee hee, I am such an asshole.”