Armageddon

by Craig Alanson

  “Pulling back now,” Smythe said without waiting for me. Technically, he was complying with an order I had already given. We had served together long enough that he knew he had wide latitude to conduct away operations as he saw fit. I would only interfere with him if I thought he didn’t appreciate the big picture.

  It took twenty-two seconds for his people to pull back to what Skippy designated as safe zones, then we fired a maser beam. It was only one of the point-defense cannons, but it seared through the docking bay doors like they were made of plywood. Under Skippy’s direction, the beam made a neat round hole in the outer door, resumed cutting something inside the station, and abruptly snapped off. Even before the beam quit, a missile was on the way, thrusters firing wildly to make the hard turn and guide it through the glowing hole in the outer doors.

  The human eye, and the human brain, are slow. To my mind, that missile’s ass end had no sooner disappeared inside, than a fountain of debris gushed out. “Got ‘em!” Skippy snarled. “Three dead motherfuckers.”

  “Colonel-” Smythe did not hesitate.

  Neither did I. “Go, Smythe.” While I did not like the idea of our people going into an apex-species station, I did want to get the operation over with as soon as possible.

  On the display, I watched icons of the STAR team progressing toward their targets. Most of them moved in the general direction of the stores compartments, which quite logically were near the docking bays. Other people, in pairs, raced off to enable Skippy to take control of local systems. Adams was in one of those pairs. If she got into trouble, she only had one operator as backup. I tried not to think about that.

  Icons for two other people moved in a direction I did not at first understand, because they were approaching the area blasted by our antipersonnel submunitions. Was Smythe trying to make sure the three enemy were really dead? Or was he hoping to capture some sort of technology from the debris. I was about to contact him, when I realized what those two operators were doing. They were attempting to recover the remains of the people we had lost.

  Of course Smythe would order them to do that. I was ashamed of myself for not considering that. Smythe was a professional, I needed to let him do his job, and I needed to focus on doing mine. Which was, what? What could- I snapped my fingers as an awful thought hit me. “Skippy, that station is automated. Why were those three Maxolhx there?”

  “Joe, I’m sorry. I didn’t know-”

  “This isn’t about blame. You could not have known. I don’t care about that. What I care about is, they must have come from a ship!”

  “Damn it, Joe, you’re right. I should have thought of that. I will have access to local systems aboard the station soon, I can-”

  “We’re not waiting. Pilot, back us away from the station.”

  “Joe,” Skippy said slowly. “The farther we are from the station, the more difficult it will be to cover the dropships.”

  “I know. If we have to fight another ship, we need room to maneuver. And if we get into a fight, I don’t want the station becoming collateral damage. Reed!” I called my counterpart aboard the Dutchman. “We may have trouble out here. I’m taking the Valkyrie out to scan the area. Can you step on it, get here faster to cover the boarding team dropships?”

  “Let me ask Nagatha what our options are,” she replied. There was talking in the background, then, “Colonel, Nagatha is recommending we perform a short jump, we’re too far from the station to fly there quickly.”

  “Do it,” I ordered, and closed channel. “Skippy, what’s the best way to determine if we have unwanted company out there?” Looking down, I saw my hands were shaking.

  “Whew. Joe, are you asking me if we can detect a stealthed Maxolhx ship?”

  “I’m not worried about any other type of ship, so, yes.”

  “Then we really do need separation from the station. Its gravity well and electronic signature cause too much clutter in the sensor data.”

  “Ok, Ok,” I muttered, rubbing my chin while I thought. “We’ll wait for the Dutchman to get into position, then we jump away to scan the area. I don’t want to jump too far, we need to provide fire support.”

  “Understood,” he already sounded distracted. “I am programming a search pattern now. Um, uh oh. Joe, I have been monitoring data from the STAR team’s suits and I just learned a disturbing fact. The station has a self-destruct mechanism, and it is armed.”

  “Should I pull the team out?”

  “At this point, no,” he advised, and the big display highlighted the position of the main team. “They are already in the station storage area, and I am talking Smythe through the process of identifying the components we need. However, I do suggest the Dutchman keep a greater distance from the station. If the self-destruct blows, it could severely damage any ship in the area, especially a star carrier. I have already given that information to Nagatha, and she is adjusting their inbound jump accordingly.”

  My mouth dropped open and I had to remind myself to close it. “If the self-destruct is armed, why didn’t the station detonate it?”

  “My guess is, the AI was confused about being attacked by a Maxolhx warship. During the first four seconds of the battle, it was acting purely in a defensive posture.”

  Part of the holographic display in front of me was showing a damage report for the Valkyrie. If the station had really been hitting us hard from the start, our new ship might have suffered severe damage. Skippy was right, we needed those damned power boosters, or all our effort to capture warships was for nothing. “What is the risk the self-destruct will activate now?”

  “I don’t think it is imminent, and I am taking control of local systems. Until I have complete control, there is a risk that some local submind might finish rebooting, and decide to be a hero.”

  The trusty old Dutchman jumped in and we handed off cover duty, Reed assuring me she would keep her ship at a safe distance. On the comm system, I could hear her urging Smythe to move faster. He replied that the team was already on the way back to a dropship with the first batch of power boosters, they were forced to move slowly because the cargo handling mechanism of the station had only one speed. Did I want to open my mouth and give unhelpful advice? Hell yes. To my credit, I kept my mouth shut and waited for us to fly out to a safe distance. Nagatha cut off the Dutchman’s damping field for a brief window so we could jump, and we did.

  Few things are more tedious than a grid search. Even with Valkyrie’s sophisticated sensors, we had to saturate an area of the grid with a sensor field, and wait for data to flow back to us. If we were looking for a stealthed Kristang ship, it would have lit up our displays like a Christmas tree. But we were relying on Maxolhx sensors, to detect ships that had countermeasures designed to defeat Rindhalu technology. Even with Skippy upgrading the sensors, and using his own natural awesomeness, we would have to get lucky to find a stealthy needle in that enormous haystack. Space is big, even when the search area is confined to three lightseconds around the supply station. Skippy warned me that the search was likely to be a futile effort, and that was Ok with me. I did not actually want to find and therefore have to fight an equivalent-technology warship. My goal was much more limited: to keep the enemy away long enough for the STAR team to get aboard the Dutchman, and that ship to jump safely away. Surely if a Maxolhx ship was out there, it had to be concerned that Valkyrie was a battlecruiser. The enemy didn’t know our battlecruiser was limping along on much less than full power, and the odds were that no ship visiting an isolated supply station could match a battlecruiser.

  The other factor in our favor was that, if a Maxolhx ship was out there watching us, the crew had to be asking themselves what the fuck was going on. Because both of our ships and the station were within a relatively compact area, we had been able to run all signal traffic through the ultra-secure Skippytel network, so the enemy had no way to intercept our messages. We had also jammed all of the station’s outgoing signals, using some quantum resonance bullshit that Skippy tried a
nd failed to explain. All the Maxolhx would know was an odd-looking Maxolhx Extinction-class battlecruiser, and another ship they couldn’t identify, had attacked a Maxolhx supply station without warning. Surely, any Maxolhx ship out there would hesitate and try to understand the situation, before literally jumping into trouble.

  Or, I would hesitate. It was always a bad idea to assume the enemy, especially an alien enemy, would think the same way I did.

  We needed a good justification for our actions, to make any ship out there think twice about jumping in with guns blazing.

  What could possibly be a good reason for Maxolhx warships attacking a Maxolhx supply station?

  Looking to the display for inspiration, I saw the first dropship was slipping into one of the Dutchman’s docking bays, and the other three had departed the station. Smythe had requested more time to collect more goodies from the station’s supplies, and I had denied the request. With a hostile ship potentially in the area, we could not risk lingering there. The display informed me that the first dropship had been stuffed with power boosters, not enough for the quantity we needed for both of our ships. The other three had the STAR team aboard, with as many other power boosters as they could cram in with them. The display did not state whether they had recovered any remains of the four people we lost, and I did not want to divert my focus by inquiring about that. Smythe had surely done the best he could, he didn’t need me to second-guess him.

  How to justify- I snapped my fingers. “Skippy, prepare to broadcast a message in the clear, on whatever communications channel Maxolhs warships would use when they want to warn friendly ships away.”

  “Um, Ok. Why?”

  “Because the message will state this supply station is suspected as having been hacked and taken over by a faction of the Bosphuraq, as part of their dastardly rebellion against-”

  “Dastardly? I’m not sure how to translate that.”

  “Whatever,” I ground my teeth. He so easily went off topic. “Say ‘heinous’ or something like that, whatever the Maxolhx would say. The kitties already suspect the Bosphuraq have access to dangerously advanced technology. Our story only needs to hold together long enough for the dropships-”

  “Too late, Joe!” Skippy’s voice echoed around the bridge. “Two enemy ships jumped in! A small patrol ship and a supply ship!”

  Vaguely, I heard my voice shouting orders, and the crew responded immediately. It was too late, I knew that. The sensor data we were seeing was already three seconds old, for we were three lightseconds from the station. As my peripheral vision registered our jump drive charging up, I was horrified by what the display was showing. A small ship, launching a cloud of missiles at both the Flying Dutchman and our three vulnerable dropships. It took only seven agonizingly slow seconds for the Valkyrie to form a jump field, but by that time, ten seconds had gone by in the battle we could only watch. Missile tracks arced out from the patrol vessel, curving to follow the dropships…

  “Captain!” A voice shouted from the Dutchman’s CIC.

  “See it!” Reed barked back from her pilot couch. With not enough people to crew both ships, and the Valkyrie having priority, she was acting as both captain and chief pilot for the operation. That was not optimal, and it worked only because the original plan called for the Dutchman only to provide stand-off jamming and to project a damping field. The plan, as usual, had not survived contact with reality. “All defense batteries to cover the dropships!” She ordered.

  “We have inbound, we could-”

  “We have shields,” Reed slapped the couch restraints loose and rose. Her copilot could fly the ship, she needed to-

  She was thrown off her feet as the first missile impacted the energy shield around the ship.

  We jumped. The planet was suddenly close enough to touch. On the display, the Dutchman. was fighting back, she had launched two missiles and her defensive maser cannons were pulsing on full-auto mode to cover the exposed dropships. I ordered our own weapons to engage the enemy missiles, and the words had barely left my lips when two of our dropships became fireballs. The Dutchman’s PDS cannons engaged a missile that was seeking the last dropship, but the missile was dodging wildly and the Dutchman’s targeting system could not keep up-

  The missile was exploded before it impacted, debris splattering out in a cone to pepper the dropship. A secondary explosion tore off the back half of the Panther, and then the Dutchman was engulfed in fire as two missiles exploded on contact with her shields.

  “Target that ship and fire everything we’ve got!” I heard myself roaring, even as another missile struck the Flying Dutchman.

  Skippy pleaded “Joe, we have to-”

  “I WANT THAT SHIP DEAD!” Someone screamed and it was probably me. I was out of control and I didn’t care. A faint vibration shook my chair as four missiles were spat out of their launchers, and I felt a pair of railguns fire their semi-guided darts. The darts were second to hit the enemy, for a barrage of maser beams and then a focused beam of exotic particles struck first. The patrols ship was small, not a true warship, on Earth its closest equivalent might have been a Coast Guard cutter. Faced with our massive battlecruiser and being caught in our damping field, the little ship gave us the middle finger of defiance by launching a pair of missiles and firing a railgun of its own in a futile gesture. I felt Valkyrie rock again as our shields deflected the railgun dart, then three of our missiles converged on target.

  “Joe?” Skippy asked. All I could do was breathe heavily, clenching my fists and staring at the display, paralyzed with shock.

  “Survivors?” The forward section of a Panther spun out of control, debris including bodies and body parts being ejected from the torn-open cabin. “We need to rescue the survivors,” I said in a hoarse voice. Without thinking, I stood and walked toward the pilot console to get the ship moving faster. “Is Adams-”

  “Joe!” Skippy insisted. “The Dutchman can assist survivors. We need to-”

  “The Dutchman is barely holding together,” I pointed a shaky finger at the display. Shields must have failed because the hull was scorched and pitted. Electricity arced out of shattered conduits, and blooms of plasma poured out of reactors that had automatically vented their dangerous contents.

  “Joe, we have to go. That other ship is near the edge of our damping field, it is going to jump away soon and we can’t stop it. Our momentum is carrying us in the wrong direction and we don’t have enough energy right now for a particle beam shot. We- Damn it! That other ship jumped away.”

  “Let it go, damn it,” I snapped at him. “Pilot, bring us-”

  “Belay that,” Skippy shot right back. “Joe, the enemy’s sensors have scanned the debris, they must have detected that humans were flying those Panthers. We must stop that ship from escaping!”

  The broken Panther was spinning out of control, light from the local sun glinting regularly off something shiny as it tumbled. “And leave our people here to die?”

  “If you honor what they fight for, yes,” Skippy replied softly.

  “Colonel?” Pope asked from the pilot console, his fingers poised in the air.

  “Joe,” Skippy chided me. “If that ship reports that humans are flying stolen Maxolhx warships-”

  “Yes. Yeah, yes.” My body was on autopilot, I was in such shock that I felt completely drained of emotion. “Pope, turn us around. Skippy, can you-”

  “I signaled the Dutchman, they are launching a rescue dropship shortly but-”

  “I know.” He didn’t need to say it. Everyone aboard the Panther was probably dead anyway, or would be dead the by time the Dutchman was able to launch. Valkyrie couldn’t assist, we had plenty of dropships but not enough pilots. By the time Pope or I or anyone else got down to a docking bay and warmed up a Panther for launch, it would be too late. “Can we track that ship?” My eyes searched the display. I remembered something about there being a function to project the most likely destination of another ship’s jump, but I could not find it right then
.

  “We can do better than that,” a hint of snarkiness was back in Skippy’s voice. “I was able to send a ripple of warped spacetime in that direction, it partly disrupted their jump field. Unfortunately, the ripple distorted the residual resonance, so I do not know exactly where they are. But they couldn’t have gone far, and they will need to retune their drive before they can jump again. I am calculating probable endpoints for their jump now.”

  “Pope,” I said, then nothing. For a moment, I couldn’t think of the proper command. I couldn’t think of anything to say. Pope knew what I meant, and he waited for Skippy to program the navigation system.

  A starship can jump anywhere, within a sphere defined by the amount of power input to the jump drive coils, the efficiency at which the coils use that power, and the ability of those coils to reach out to a distant point and hold open a wormhole. Skippy knew what type of ship we were hunting, but it was old and probably had been modified and upgraded over its life, so he could not accurately predict the condition or capability of its jump drive. We could have used Valkyrie’s sensors to examine the residual spacetime distortion on the near end of its jump wormhole, and calculated where the ship went. We could have done that, except Skippy sent a ripple of spacetime to disrupt the jump, which also pretty much scrambled any residual data we might have worked with. So, in a way, our chances of following that ship were slim.

  Slim was good enough for Skippy. He went silent while his massive brain crunched variables and, did unimaginable whatever math things he did. He created a model of the enemy drive, based on a split-second of data about how that drive twisted spacetime, just before they jumped away. He also knew roughly the direction that ship had tried to jump. “Got it,” he announced abruptly.

  “Initiating jump,” Pope said from the pilot couch, and we began the hunt.

  Skippy had been able to determine where the enemy had gone, within a radius of ninety-eight lightseconds, so we jumped toward that imaginary sphere. That might sound miraculously accurate, given that the enemy had jumped a distance of thirteen lighthours, but you have to remember how vast space is. A ninety-eight lightsecond margin of error creates a spherical search area that is thirty-six and a half million miles across. Even with Valkyrie’s sophisticated sensors, upgraded by Skippy, it would take us over twenty minutes to scan that area. Because Skippy guessed the enemy would be able to retune their drive within eight or nine minutes, we couldn’t wait that long.