Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “Ohhhhh,” he got it. “That second wormhole is a super-duty type, right?”

  “As you would say; ‘Egg-zactly’. Can it be done?”

  “Joe, I truly do not know. This is quite intriguing. My initial answer is no, it can’t be done. As you know, there are cases where the figure-eight patterns of wormholes overlap, and the network is very careful to avoid endpoints emerging where they might interfere with each other. Certainly, the network would not allow the event horizons to overlap for obvious reasons, but hmmm. Event horizons that are parallel to each other. Facing each other and really close, but not touching?”

  “That’s the idea, yeah. Can you do that?”

  “Again, I do not know. I will need to think about it. If, if, it can be done, I suspect it will be a one-shot deal. The network may allow me to do it, only because the network probably never anticipated anyone would attempt such a lunatic scheme. After that, the network almost certainly will alter its programming to prevent that crazy shit from happening again.”

  “Crap. So, there’s no way to test it?”

  “Not on an actual Elder wormhole, no. However, because I am Skippy the Magnificent, I can test the concept by using microwormholes. Like their larger Elder cousins, my microwormholes are stable tunnels through spacetime, with event horizons on both ends.”

  “Great! That is awesome, Skippy, I knew you could do it.”

  “Um, hold your praise until I have time to test the concept. I need to do this at a safe distance from the ship, and it will likely be an iterative process. Um, that means-”

  “Iterative means you keep doing it until you get it right. I’m not stupid, Skippy.”

  “Says the guy who still has cappuccino foam on his lip.”

  “Oh,” I wiped my upper lip and, damn it, he wasn’t lying.

  “I must warn you, there might be a lot of trial-and-error until I figure out how to do it. If it can be done.”

  “If anyone can do it, you can.”

  “That praise would mean a lot more, if it wasn’t coming from a monkey.”

  “When can you start testing?”

  “Preparing for a test now.”

  “Wow. That was fast.”

  “Ah, this idiotic notion of yours has me intrigued, so I’m throwing you a bone. Now, please, shut up and leave me alone to work. I’m still assembling the Valkyrie, upgrading the Dutchman, and now I have to conduct a series of dangerous experiments with microwormholes. So give me space to-”

  “Uh, wait. What do you mean dangerous?”

  “I will be placing the event horizons of microwormholes in close proximity. Remember what happened the last time we deliberately overlapped wormholes?”

  “Sure. It blew the hell out of a Maxolhx cruiser. But that’s because one of those wormholes was created by the jump drive of the cruiser. That jump drive had a tremendous amount of energy. Microwormholes are small, like tiny. How could they be dangerous?”

  “All wormholes, even at nanoscale, are tears in the fabric of local spacetime. What do you think it takes for me to create one of my magical creations? I assure you, it does not involve a pair of ‘D’ size batteries, dumdum.”

  “Oh. So, what would happen if two microwormholes overlapped?”

  “Again, because I have never done that, I truly do not know. The result could be a faint fizzle, or an impressive eruption of potential energies from higher dimensions.”

  “Well, crap, whatever you’re doing, stop it right now.”

  “You don’t want me to conduct the experiments?”

  “I want you to perform your mad scientist tricks somewhere away from the ship. We can load the microwormholes into those little disposable sensor probes you threw together. Then you can smash them together like demolition derby cars at a county fair.”

  “Oh. Good point, Joe. Hmm. I will need to balance being far enough away to be safe, while being close enough for me to have very precise control over the probes as I maneuver them.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a third thing you need to factor in. The experiment needs to be close enough that we can see it from the ship.”

  “Um, Ok. Why is that?”

  “Skippy, come on, are you kidding me? You will be playing demolition derby and blowing shit up. I gotta see that!”

  Shockingly, I was not the only person who wanted to watch Skippy’s Wormhole Extreme Grudge Match. We had to schedule the test for when most people would be off duty, and we set up the galley like we did for movie night, with the chairs facing the big display wall. We made a big batch of popcorn, and I authorized beer for the evening. It might surprise you, but demolition derby and blowing shit up proved to be popular with the crew, especially, and I know this is unexpected, with the guys. Go figure, huh?

  Skippy even had the ship’s fabricators crank out T-shirts for the occasion.

  Skippy must have gotten into the festive mood, or his control over the little probes holding microwormholes was not as precise as he bragged about, because the first test was a failure. The crew cheered when they saw the two probes get ripped apart, then they groaned when they realized how little energy had been released.

  “Hmm,” Skippy muttered. “Well, shit.”

  “Those disposable probes aren’t accurate enough for the job?” I asked.

  “They are crude, but I can compensate. My disappointment was over the lack of useful data from the experiment. Those darned event horizons are so small, I could barely see them. Um, Joe, I think I need to pump up the volume, if you know what I mean.”

  “I thought microwormholes fall apart if you expand them.”

  “That is true, but I can hold them in an expanded state, long enough for me to verify the results of the experiment.”

  “Ok, sounds good. Go ahead.”

  “Um, I will need to move the probes farther from the ship. That will take twenty minutes or more. Remember, microwormholes must be maneuvered very gently, I can’t slam the probes into high acceleration.”

  “Shit.” I looked around at the disappointed faces around me.

  “If you like, I can entertain the crowd with selections from my opera.”

  “I would not like,” I waved my arms for calm as faces turned white and people stood up abruptly to leave. “Twenty minutes, huh?”

  “More like thirty. Forty, to be safe.”

  “Ok, then how about you show us a classic episode of the A-Team while we wait?”

  “Ooh! Ooh! Really?! Don’t toy with me, Joe.”

  “For realz, homeboy. Hey, could you add witty commentary, like on Mystery Science Theater?”

  “Joe,” he was choked up with emotion. “If I never said this before, I love you, my brotha.”

  “You never said it, but right back atcha, brother.”

  The A-Team sucked a lot less than I remembered. Maybe it was Skippy’s hilarious commentary, or how he perfectly overdubbed some of the dialog. Mister T’s classic line ‘I pity the fool’ became ‘I’m a pretty girl’, which, considering his gaudy jewelry, kind of made more sense. The A-Team emptied a whole crate of five point five six ammo at point-blank range without hitting anything, and that Starbuck guy got with the girl at the end. We all had great fun laughing at the team’s poor muzzle discipline and other screw-ups.

  Then it was time to resume blowing shit up for real.

  Skippy became increasingly frustrated, the explosions became increasingly larger, and the crowd in the galley became increasingly more vocal as wormholes collided every couple minutes. We were all having great fun, except I began to worry we would run out of disposable drones before Skippy completed his experiments.

  Then, a pair of wormholes approached, and nothing exploded. The probes backed away, approached again, once, twice, seventeen times until Skippy was satisfied. “Success! It works. Damn, this is yet another sign of my awesomeness.”

  “Great,” I clapped my hands. “Will it work with a real wormhole?”

  “Those are real wormholes, Joe,” he sniffed, offended. “The
operating principles are the same, just scaled up enormously. I will need to keep the event horizons separated by eight hundred meters.”

  “Oh,” I tried to keep my dismay from showing. “That’s farther apart than I thought it would be.” In my mind, I had imagined the two event horizons almost touching each other. “Will a ship coming out of one wormhole have time to avoid going through the other one?”

  “No way, dude,” he assured me. “The standard speed for Maxolhx ships transitioning through a wormhole is around seventeen hundred kilometers per hour. Ships would fly through the gap before their sensors could reset. Even if a ship realized what was happening, no way could it turn quickly enough to avoid going through the second wormhole. And if by some freakin’ miracle a ship managed to alter course that quickly, it would clip the edge of the second wormhole’s event horizon, and tear the ship apart. Uh!” He held up a finger and shushed me before I could speak. “Before you ask if I could offset the wormholes, so ships would deliberately hit the edge of the second wormhole, the answer is NO. I already thought of that and tested it. It’s not possible. Unless the event horizons are aligned precisely to mirror each other, their event horizons skew along one axis, and collide with catastrophic results.”

  “Oh. Well, thanks for checking that. Are we done? Are you satisfied with the test results?”

  “Yes, except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hold my beer.” He expanded the last two microwormholes, and smashed them together for an impressive explosion. The crowd in the galley cheered. “Joe, we should talk about details.”

  “Ok, uh,” the crowd wasn’t ready for the show to be over. “How about you run another A-Team episode for the crew, and you and I will talk in my office?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  I had mentally prepared some lavish praise for Skippy, but as soon as I got into my office, he crushed my hopes. “That was fun. You do realize your plan will never work, right?”

  “Uh-”

  “Come on. You can’t be that dimwitted.”

  “I might surprise you, Skippy. Try me.”

  “Ugh. Dude, this is so simple. There are many obstacles to making your plan work. Did you think this through? No, wait, of course you didn’t. You just blurted out something off the top of your head, without considering all the potential problems. Think, Joe, think. You keep saying that you need to stop reacting to events, and create a long-term plan, but instead, you keep lurching from one crisis to another.”

  That was harsh, and it hurt to hear, and it was true. No, not completely true. When we completed our Renegade mission, I was congratulating myself for having secured humanity’s future for several hundred years. Even after Emily Perkins unknowingly screwed everything up for us, we dreamed up a brilliant plan to frame the Boshpuraq, a plan that should have worked. It did work, except the Maxolhx are prideful, stubborn asswipes. “I hear you. We haven’t done anything yet, so we have plenty of time to-”

  “Joe, the problem is not just this particular issue. You need to wargame your plans, run them through what-if scenarios to see if there are any glaringly obvious flaws in your thinking. Hint: there are. See, if you were a real colonel, you would have learned to do that. Ok, I’ll break this down Barney-style for you. To make this plan work, we need to connect one of the wormholes along battlegroup’s flightpath, to at least a heavy-duty wormhole. The endpoints of those wormholes must emerge near each other. Do you foresee any problem with that?”

  “Ah, crap. Yeah. To make those work, the figure-eight patterns of the two wormholes have to be overlapping each other. I suppose none of the wormholes along their flightpath overlay their patterns with a heavy-duty wormhole?”

  “No, they do not, Joe. In fact, along their most likely flightpaths, there are only three wormholes that overlay with other wormholes, in what we call a cluster. All of those three along their potential flightpaths clusters lead in the wrong direction, away from any heavy-duty wormholes.”

  “Damn it, you asshole. You knew this plan wouldn’t work, yet you let me make a show of the tests in front of the whole crew? I look like a fool now.”

  “Right. You look like a fool now,” his voice dripped with sarcasm. “Joe, I didn’t warn you against making a big deal of the tests, because I thought for certain the tests would be a complete failure, and that would be the end of it. My fear was that I would look like a fool. Joe the clever monkey has another genius idea, but Skippy the idiot can’t make it work. It surprised even me that my extreme awesomeness developed a way to hold event horizons parallel, without their destabilizing effect on local spacetime causing them to touch and destroy each other. So, I figured, why not let the monkeys have some fun at my expense? Now I am stuck trying to make your impractical idea work, and I will look like the bad guy. If you had more than one brain cell, you would have known this plan had no chance, even if we could find the right combination of wormholes.”

  “Clearly, my brain is not working today, so why don’t you smack some knowledge on me?”

  “This is disappointing, Joe. You already have this knowledge, you are not applying it. Ok, I won’t keep an idiot in suspense. Your plan might work, if the Maxolhx were sending only one ship, or a bunch of ships attached to a single star carrier. Instead, they are sending two star carriers. Also, as I told you before, the Maxolhx are being cautious, ever since they believe they discovered the Bosphuraq have access to unknown advanced technologies. The standard operating procedure of that battlegroup, when approaching a wormhole, is to send a ship ahead to scout for danger. The star carriers wait a safe distance away, while one ship detaches and goes through the wormhole. That ship scans the area on the other side, and the star carriers proceed to go through the event horizon only if they get an All Clear signal from the scout ship. The star carriers go through one at a time, with several minutes between them. You see the problem now?”

  “Yeah,” I groaned. He was right. I am a short-sighted dumdum. “Sorry for- wait.” Maybe I’m not such a dumdum. “We still have those pixie things, right? We can wait on the far end, outside the galaxy, until the scout ship comes through. Then, we copy its pixie signature, and fake an All Clear message back to the star carriers. After the second star carrier comes through, we sneak around them, back to the galaxy, and you shut down the wormhole behind- Wait. No, no I just heard myself talking, and that is a stupid idea. We would have to also copy the pixie of the first star carrier-”

  “Plus the pixies of every ship attached to that star carrier,” he finished my thought. “Plus, we would have to jam the transmissions of all ships, while the Valkyrie remains in stealth. Plus, plus, the Maxolhx could simply turn their ships around and go back through. We would have to destroy or disable all the ships that come through. Even Valkryie can’t take on that many ships of equivalent technology.”

  “To make this work,” I leaned back in my chair, closing my eyes. The beginnings of a headache were starting to throb in my skull. “We would need to hack into the communications systems of all the ships in the battlegroup, plus hack their navigation, so they couldn’t turn around and go back through to warn the ships still on this side. Ah, you’re right, it is freakin’ impossible.”

  “Joe, much as it delights me to see you wallow in self-loathing, I must put you out of your misery. It is- Ugh, I can’t believe I am telling you this. I am smart, why do I go looking for trouble? Ok, numbskull, listen good because I’m only going to say this once. It is possible to hack into the control systems of a Maxolhx ship. It would only allow temporary control, and only over secondary systems the Maxolhx consider unimportant.”

  “Secondary systems? Like what, their coffee maker?”

  “No, not the coffee maker, you moron.”

  “Ok, then you can hack into navigation, propulsion, communications, any of that?”

  “No, no, and no.”

  “You might want to rethink about your definition of-”

  “Joe, do you know how a navigation sys
tem works?”

  “Uh, yes, duh. I am a pilot.”

  “That is debatable. Navigation is about determining where you are, deciding where you want to go, and calculating a course to your destination, right?”

  “That’s a very simple way to explain it, but, yeah. You plot a course from where you are, to your destination.”

  “Mm hmm,” he agreed. “To plot a course, you need to use math, right?”

  “Uh, sure? I mean, I-” In my head I went through the steps of programming a dropship navigation system. “I don’t actually crunch the numbers, the nav system does that.”

  “Correct. You monkeys randomly bash your fists on the keyboard, and the system does the actual math, without you needing to know how the math actually works. Maxolhx starships work the same way. All their AIs and subsidiary systems rely on library files to tell them that the number Three comes between Two and Four.”

  “Seriously?”

  “How do you know the sequence of numbers?”

  “Uh, I learned it in school, I guess?”

  “You learned it, but now that information is stored somewhere in the gray mush you call a brain. My point is, you never have to think about it, the info is just there. Maxolhx computer systems work the same way. They rely on library files for basic info. So basic, they never think about it. Those library files are taken for granted, and the security on them is relatively poor. I can hack into those library files, corrupt the math, and the AIs will be unable to function.”

  “It can’t be that simple.”

  “Ah, but it is, Joe. This is a vulnerability I discovered when I examined the Valkyrie. The Maxolhx have developed computer systems so sophisticated, they have forgotten how those systems really work. The rotten kitties, and their AIs, take for granted many things they never have to consciously think about. When the ship control AIs realize there is a problem, they will crash. After a lengthy reboot procedure, they will perform the calculations by themselves, and create a workaround to bypass the systems affected by my hack. That will take several minutes, if the hack works the way I expect. Those arrogant AIs will at first not believe what is happening.”