“What can you do to help her?”
“I’m doing everything I can, with priority on preserving the brain function she has. Um, that might have sounded worse than I intended. Or, maybe it is that bad. Time will tell.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“If you are considering a grand gesture, like staying beside her bed every second until she wakes up, do not waste your time. She is in a tank full of nanogel, and like I said, a deep coma. It will be at least eight, ten days before I would attempt to administer treatment. Maybe more. Her brain needs to stabilize, before I can work on it.”
“I can’t do nothing, Skippy.”
“I understand that. I feel helpless too. Something else. Joe, I, I, really want to kill something right now. I want to make someone hurt bad. Emotions like that scare me. You know I fear that I am destined for evil things.”
“Skippy, it bothers you that you might lose control. That’s a good sign. A bad person wouldn’t worry about it.”
“I will have to take your word for it. Because if I do lose control, I can cause a shitstorm of damage. Joe, there are two other injured people we haven’t talked about yet. They will be coming out of critical condition within the next, probably twelve to fourteen hours. You can be there when they awake. More importantly, you can follow your own advice?”
“My advice? What’s that?”
“You told me to honor Fal’s memory by continuing to protect Earth. What do you think Margaret would say if she found you moping around here, while you still have a mission to complete?”
Pushing myself away from the bulkhead, I drew myself up straight. “She would tell me to suck it up, and she’d be a hundred percent right about that. Skippy,” I turned away, “if you need me, I’ll be on the bridge.”
What I said was bullshit. No, not completely bullshit. I did go to the bridge. Before I did that, I went to my spacious new cabin, curled up on my bunk, and sobbed until I had no more tears.
Desai, gone.
Giraud, gone.
Smythe might never serve in uniform again.
Adams might never be able to speak again, or walk, or do much of anything. If she lived.
Twenty-five people dead at the supply station. Plus two killed when we took the Valkyrie. That was twenty-seven killed during this mission, on my watch.
My command, my responsibility.
I felt like staying in my bunk forever.
What I did was get up, shower, put on a fresh uniform, and go to the bridge.
Because it was my command, my responsibility.
CHAPTER FORTY
Captain Frey walked into my new office before she announced herself, because there wasn’t really a normal door. “Sir?”
“Frey,” I looked up from my laptop. “Come in.”
She walked across the carpet or whatever it was, still limping to the point where she over-rotated her hips and dragged one foot. The report I got from Skippy that morning stated Frey would not be able to return to normal duties for another two weeks, and that was assuming she did not push her rehab too hard and re-injure her leg. Instead of sitting, she stood at the corner of the desk, which was really a couple of empty plastic crates with a composite panel on top. Skippy proposed to make a real desk for me, once the ship’s fabricators were done cranking out all the important stuff we actually needed. At the moment, I felt like flipping the desk over and screaming. But, Adams would have scolded me for not saving my energy for something useful, so I put a lid on my anger and frustration. “What’s up?” I asked in not the most professional manner.
“I finished with blah blah blah-”
She did not actually say ‘blah blah blah’. Or maybe she did. I wasn’t listening. “Colonel Bishop?”
“Huh? Sorry, Frey.” She had seen my eyes distracted by the laptop in front of me. I spun it around so the screen faced her. “This is the report I started, after Skippy told me the Maxolhx are sending a battlegroup to Earth. I titled it ‘Operation Armageddon’. I know, it’s a bit dramatic.”
“Not at all, Sir. We’re facing the destruction of our homeworld.”
“Again, Frey. We’re facing the destruction of Earth, again. We’ve been through this before, remember? When I started this report, I thought the ‘Armadeggon’ part would happen only if we couldn’t stop that battlegroup. But,” I reached for the keyboard and scrolled down, to the names of people we had just lost. “That word describes what just happened to us, to the Pirates.” She didn’t say anything. I could not imagine what she was feeling. Relief that her injury had meant she remained aboard the Valkyrie, while the STAR team raided the station? Or maybe guilt that she had survived, when so many had not? “How is your team, Captain?”
“They’re not my team, Sir. Major Kapoor is in command now.”
“You know what I mean,” I reminded myself to keep the irritation I felt out of my tone of voice. She hadn’t done anything wrong. “How are people dealing with this,” what was the right word to describe what happened? “The disaster?”
“Each in their own way. Kapoor’s team,” she shrugged. Kapoor and five others had been kept aboard Valkyrie as a reserve force, while the rest of the STARs went to raid the supply station. Frey, and the six others who had been injured during the boarding operation to take our battlecruiser, had a legitimate reason for surviving. They had been physically unfit for duty, and they had been ordered to remain behind. Kapoor had no such excuse. He and the five had simply been lucky, it had been their turn to serve as a reserve force. At the time, they might have grumbled at missing the opportunity, and enduring being mocked by their fellow operators. Now, they had to deal with the fact that their survival was purely luck. Of the entire STAR team, we now had six people combat-capable, plus nine other like Frey, who might return to training at some point. Whatever we would do next, it could not rely on a large special operations team.
“I will talk with Kapoor,” I said. Major Kapoor was not new to the Merry Band of Pirates, he had been with us on Newark, back when he was a lieutenant. He had missed our long Black Ops mission while he trained Indian Army paratroopers, and of course he had not been one of the few to sign onto our mutinous Renegade mission. I didn’t know a lot about him, other than that Smythe had approved him to rejoin the Merry Band of Pirates, and that was all I needed to know. Skippy said Smythe should be lucid and able to talk soon, I would ask his advice about dealing with Kapoor then. No, I had a better idea. I would let Smythe give Kapoor advice about managing our remaining STAR personnel. “Captain,” I turned my thoughts back to Frey. “Best thing you can do now is to continue your rehab. We need you combat ready ASAP, but we need you fully ready. That means no shortcuts.”
“Yes, Sir.”
I looked pointedly at her gimpy leg. “How is it?”
“Itches like hell, and it’s warm,” she grimaced. “Skippy insists we can’t feel nanomachines crawling around inside us. He’s wrong.”
“Skippy is never wrong, Frey,” I winked, and neither of us felt any amusement. “Carry on, Captain.”
“Yes. And, Sir? The operation was not a disaster. We achieved the objective. The people we lost knew the risks, they went anyway. Protecting Earth is worth their lives, all of our lives, too.”
“Only if we stop that battlegroup.”
“We are doing that? Sir?”
“One way or another, that battlegroup is not getting to Earth, Frey.”
We got lucky. After the people we had lost recently, the Universe owed us one, so I was not especially grateful for our good fortune. By pinging a Maxolhx relay station, we learned that the battlegroup’s flightpath would take those ships through the wormhole cluster near the Crescent Nebula. You have to understand that ‘near’ in this case means that cluster of two wormholes were seventy-four lightyears from the edge of that nebula. When trying to describe where things are, in and around the vast expanse of the Milky Way galaxy, I have to be kind of vague. Anyway, the Crescent nebula probably doesn’t mean anything to y
ou, it sure didn’t mean anything to me. I didn’t care where the damned thing was, as long as we knew its location, and could get there well before the enemy arrived.
Before we could go meet the bad guys, we had to prepare all the wormholes along the path the battlegroup would take on their unplanned journey outside the galaxy. First, we flew to an isolated wormhole, where Skippy made the network do its recon thing. The target wormhole near the Crescent nebula was alone, no ships were waiting to go through on that end. Nagatha took the Dutchman through, engaged stealth and parked the ship a safe distance away. Skippy then closed the wormhole and screwed with it, so we could fly the Valkyrie toward the dormant super-duty wormhole he needed to wake up.
Communicating with, activating and opening that powerful wormhole took a full day, before Skippy was certain it was stable and operating correctly. We sent a Panther through on remote control, and it came back fifteen minutes later. The sensor images from the Panther were spectacular, with the Milky Way seen at an angle from above, or I guess it could be thought of as below. The concepts of ‘up’ and ‘down’ don’t mean anything in deep space.
Anyway, the Panther confirmed the other end of that super-duty wormhole was far outside the galaxy, far enough that those Maxolhx ships would die in the cold empty wastes of intergalactic space. No way could they reach the nearest star. It was a perfect set-up. Now all we needed was some luck.
Oh, and we needed one last thing.
“Skippy,” I turned to his avatar, perched on the seat next to mine. We were waiting for the other wormhole in the cluster to become available, because at that moment there was a group of Jeraptha ships waiting to go through. “Can you really do all that bullshit you talked about?”
He knew I was not in a mood to joke around with him. Skippy himself seemed upset and angry and depressed. He was acting like he felt the loss of our valiant people was partly his fault, and Skippy rarely took responsibility for anything that went wrong. The emotional funk he was in had me kind of worried, we could not afford for him to be distracted from the delicate work he would be doing. Not knowing how Skippy’s brain was functioning inside his beer can was a problem, it again made me wish we could have erased the Valkyrie’s homicidal AI and installed Nagatha. She could have told me whether Skippy was up to the job. Instead, I had to trust him, and my own instincts.
“By ‘bullshit’, you mean can I connect all the wormholes in a chain, and hold their extremely dangerous event horizons in precise alignment, so they do not contact each other and destroy their wormholes? Do that, in a way that the gamma radiation generated by having event horizons in close proximity, is directed outward instead of bleeding through so it can be detected by the Maxolhx? Hold that series in stable alignment, until the second star carrier has gone through to be stranded far outside the galaxy? Is that what you mean by ‘bullshit’?”
“Yeah. All that. Plus, you know, crashing those ship AIs by screwing with their math libraries or whatever.”
“You do understand that at this point, hacking the libraries has already been done, and it will either work or it won’t? I have high confidence it will work as planned. If I were a Jeraptha, I could be inclined to bet the farm on this one, Joseph.”
He called me ‘Joseph’, I noticed the significance of that right away. He also was not in a mood for bantering back and forth. “I know we can’t do anything about that now, and I do trust your extreme awesomeness. Do you have the same level of confidence about your wacky chain of wormholes thing?”
“No. I don’t have the same level of confidence about that aspect of the plan, because I can’t. Joe, I was able to test the library hack using the Valkyrie’s AI. It works, and I have every possible confidence it will work as planned against the enemy ships. With the chain of wormholes, I cannot have the same level of confidence, because I have not been able to test it. It could work, or the network could lock me out before I get the chain completed. My confidence is based on the simple fact that, so far, the network has been entirely reactive. It establishes safety protocols only after we have done some dangerously wacky stunt. Joe, the wormhole network was programmed by the Elders. I don’t think they ever imagined someone could do crazy shit like the stuff you have dreamed up. Apparently,” he shrugged. “They never met a monkey.”
“Ok, I get it, we can’t control everything. All I want to know is whether we have accounted for everything we can control.”
“Yes. However, there is one factor that could screw up everything, or it could force us to take a risk you need to consider ahead of time. Because if it does happen, you won’t have time to wring your hands and agonize about it.”
“I make pretty quick decisions, Skippy.” That was true, to a fault. I made quick decisions, to the point of being impulsive. On Columbus Day, I had gotten friends to help me attack the Ruhar, armed only with dynamite and an ice cream truck. I had not really thought the plan through, other than trying to do something when aliens had attacked our world. Way back in Nigeria, I had instinctively thrown myself on a landmine when I thought our platoon was in danger. If I had used my brain, I would have realized that it was an antitank mine, that its force would be directed upward to penetrate the skin of an armored vehicle, and that my body parts might kill people. “What is this factor I have to think about?”
“When the Maxolhx approaches the Crescent wormhole, I have to allow that wormhole to open at the normal place and time, at whatever emergence point the Maxolhx choose.”
We knew the commander of that battlegroup had been given limited flexibility to alter the flightplan, and that natural variability in jumping across long distances meant we could not predict which emergence point the battlegroup would choose. That didn’t matter, because the wormhole network’s recon ability, that Skippy had recently tapped into, would alert us when and where the battlegroup was waiting to go through. We would be waiting on the other end of that wormhole, where Skippy could use the recon feature to send signals through to control that wormhole, then the next one, and so on until he had the chain linked up all the way to the super-duty wormhole that connected way outside the galaxy.
“Ok, fine. Why does that matter?” I asked.
“It matters because the Maxolhx will decide when they send a scout ship through, we will not be able to influence their decision. Before that happens, I will need to set up the chain of wormholes, all the way beyond the galaxy. The problem is if, right at the time I need to connect one of the wormholes along the chain, a ship is trying to use that wormhole at one of its normal emergence points. Joe, we can’t delay, or the whole plan falls apart. I won’t know what is happening at each wormhole along the chain, until the previous wormhole connects, and I can use the recon feature.”
“Ok, so,” I ran a hand over my head and tousled my hair. “A ship might see our wormhole-chain thing happening right in front of it.”
“Ah, that is not a major risk. I will be linking the chain at locations that are not on the scheduled routes of any wormholes, so it would be extremely unlikely any ship just happens to be there in empty interstellar space. No, the more likely problem is, if one of the wormholes along the chain is already open and a ship is approaching at the time when I need to link the chain. I will need to slam that wormhole closed at that location, and reopen it along the chain. A ship would see that odd behavior. I need your approval for me to link the chain, regardless of the consequences.”
“That’s not optimal,” I hated when buzzwords crept into my speech without me thinking about it. I didn’t want to be one of those annoying guys. “Skippy, whatever you gotta do to send that battlegroup to hell, do it.”
“Understood. Joe, the wormhole is now available.”
I stood up and patted the back of my chair. “Reed, you have the conn. Take us through.”
“Aye aye,” she acknowledged.
She looked tired. “Reed,” I paused in the doorway. “I’ll be back to relieve you in an hour, then you are hitting the sack to get rest.”
&nb
sp; It showed how tired she was that she didn’t argue. “Yes, Sir.”
My new office was too big, and way too gaudy. It had been the office of the ship’s previous captain, and the compartment had been designed to showcase the authority of that officer. Everything was too big. The chair made me feel like a little kid sitting at the grownup’s table, my feet barely touched the deck. I remember when we captured the Flying Dutchman, the bridge and Combat Information Center complex had been decorated in a truly tasteless baroque fashion that one of our Pirates had described as looking like a New Orleans bordello. The bunks had all been too small, until we ripped them out and installed new bunks at Earth. The problem we had now was the opposite, but much less of a problem for us.
If I adjusted the chair as low as it could go, the makeshift desk would be too high, so I dealt with it. “Skippy, I need to ask you a question. A serious question.”
“I do not think either of us is in the mood for witty banter, Joe,” he said, as he appeared on my temporary desk.
“Mood is what I want to talk about. I know you are upset about the people we lost.”
“The people we lost, and the people who are suffering through painful and exhausting medical treatments. My patients should be recovering peacefully, instead of trying to get back to combat readiness as soon as they can. It is not fair to them.”
“Skippy, I agree, but do you think any of them would prefer to be relaxing on a beach?”
“No,” he sighed. “I suppose not. However, they are feeling under enormous pressure to complete the treatment regimen as quickly as possible, regardless of the cost to themselves. After this operation is completed, the ship and crew need downtime.”
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