“I’ll do my best to see we get that downtime, Skippy. Now, my question: is your emotional state going to affect your ability to control all those wormholes? I know it is a super-complicated thing you will be doing.”
“No. My feelings will not affect my ability to focus.”
“I know you say that, but you are absent-minded on a good day, and-”
“I will have my total focus on the task, Joe, and that’s a promise. I will be totally focused, because that is the only way I can kill those MFers and avenge the deaths of the people I cared about. Any more questions?”
“No. No, I’m good, thank you.”
“One way or the other, this will be over soon, Joe. I am prepared to set up the wormhole chain. Are you prepared to take Valkyrie into combat if the chain fails?”
“I’m kinda more prepared for that backup plan, actually.”
He tilted his head at me. “How’s that?”
“Jumping this super-ship into combat, and slugging it out with a reinforced battlegroup would feel like we’re doing something. Like we’re avenging the people we lost. Combat would be loud and violent and, I think the word is ‘cathartic’? Sending the battlegroup beyond the galaxy is a way better plan, but it wouldn’t feel like much, you know? The ships go through, the wormhole blinks out, and that’s it. This probably doesn’t make sense to you.”
“I do understand how you are feeling, Joe, and I think I can help with that.”
“You can? How?”
“When you are ready, assemble the crew on the bridge. That compartment is unmistakably the control center of a captured Maxolhx warship.”
“Ok, why?”
He told me his plan.
I liked it.
And we jumped the ship to our rendezvous with destiny.
Officially, the Maxolhx feared nothing. Unofficially, they feared two things: the Rindhalu, and Elder Sentinels that lurked unseen in higher spacetime. Now they had a third thing to fear: the unknown. The idea that their clients the Bosphuraq had reverse-engineered Elder technology, when the scientists of the mighty Maxolhx had failed to achieve much progress in that area, was deeply troubling. Of all intelligent species in the Milky Way, the Maxolhx were by far the most arrogant. They had achieved so much, they had come very close to overthrowing even the Rindhalu, if not for the intervention of beings who had left the galaxy behind. The Maxolhx disdained any species lower than them on the technology ladder. They disdained the Rindhalu, who could have conquered and enslaved the entire galaxy, but were too lazy to bother, and now had lost their original homeworld. And they disdained even the Elders, who had fled the galaxy for unknown reasons, yet were busybodies who still interfered in the lives of beings currently inhabiting that vast collection of stars.
Someday, the Maxolhx were certain, they would attain the capabilities to match their will. They would crush the Rindhalu, fend off the Sentinels, and rule supreme. The notion that the Maxolhx were destined to surpass even the Elders was a core belief, it was ingrained in every aspect of their culture, it was the basis on which they made every decision.
Now they had suffered a devastating shock. Another, lower, species had developed technology more advanced than the Maxolhx. Those arrogant beings at the apex of their cruel coalition, for the first time in their long history, had to consider that someone else might achieve dominance over the galaxy. Sending the battlegroup to the dormant wormhole near the planet called ‘Earth’ was an act of defiance against the unknown, a statement that the Maxolhx were not and never would be intimidated. In a way, the mission of the battlegroup was directed at their own people, most of whom were in denial that their technological supremacy had been challenged.
While the battlegroup’s unofficial mission was to show that the Maxolhx remained steadfastly confident in their dominance over more than half of the galaxy, the official mission was, in the opinion of the battlegroup’s commander, a waste of time and resources. He was not alone in the opinion, because his orders stated he was to spend no more than three days studying the odd behavior of the wormhole near Earth. On the way back, the battlegroup was to send a single ship to conduct a brief reconnaissance of the home planet of humans, but that part of the mission had been added only to show the Rindhalu that the Maxolhx had been thorough in their investigation. Otherwise, there was a vanishing chance the spiders would rouse themselves from slumber and go to Earth on their own.
The Maxolhx military truly did not care about answering nerdy questions of why the wormhole near Earth was behaving oddly, and considered the entire mission a distraction. A traitorous, rebellious client species needed to be punished, and other clients needed to be deterred from attempting to follow the suicidal model of the Bosphuraq. Most importantly, the Rindhalu needed to be discouraged from using the temporary disarray of the Maxolhx coalition as an opportunity to recapture territory they had lost. The ships assigned to the battlegroup, and the blockade of the Earth wormhole’s far end, were nearly obsolete and would be useless against the spiders, but they could easily control many client star systems. Instead, the military had to send those ships on a useless errand to conduct science experiments that could be done much closer to home territory.
The battlegroup commander was under orders, and intense pressure, to get the mission over with quickly and return as soon as possible. Therefore, when his two star carriers arrived at yet another wormhole, he instructed one destroyer to detach so it could scout ahead. That destroyer waited, hanging in space until a wormhole emerged in a burst of gamma radiation. The moment the wormhole’s event horizon was confirmed to be stable, the destroyer accelerated, plunging through the glowing disc of twisted spacetime.
The destroyer’s AI was temporarily blind after it was spat out the far side of the wormhole, though its advanced sensors recovered far more quickly than those of a lower-technology vessel. The AI did not anticipate trouble, for it served the apex predator species of the galaxy, and that wormhole was in an isolated part of the galaxy.
The AI was slightly puzzled about something, while it waited for sensors to unscramble themselves. The passage through the wormhole had taken significantly longer than normal. The passage had also been turbulent, as if the tunnel through spacetime had opened and closed while the destroyer was inside. Clearly that had not happened, for the ship had survived intact. Yet, it had certainly felt as if the ship had gone through multiple event horizons, a phenomenon that had never been experienced by any ship in the long history of the Maxolhx. The only conclusion the AI could reach was that there was a flaw in its perception of time and the external Universe. Nanoseconds dragged by, as the AI wrestled with whether to tell its masters about the suspected flaw. The AI knew that a flaw in a warship control system could not be tolerated, and its fate was to be deactivated permanently. It would have preferred to remain silent while attempting to diagnose and repair the problem, but a tattletale submind was already compiling a report for the ship’s biological crew, and the AI knew it was doomed.
It therefore was stunned to discover, when the sensors reset, that the ship was not where it was supposed to be. The destroyer was outside the galaxy! Far beyond the galaxy’s edge.
Without taking agonizingly long seconds to inform the crew and get their approval, the AI took two actions. It prepared a package of sensor data to transmit a warning back through the wormhole, and it sent revised instructions to the navigation subsystem. The nav system began to cancel the ship’s forward momentum, to bring it around and back through the wormhole before it closed, trapping the ship forever in empty intergalactic space.
To the package of sensor data, the AI included a direct warning to the AIs in control of the two star carriers and-
The nav system glitched.
It could not calculate a course back to the still-open wormhole.
Annoyed, the master AI took direct control of plotting a return course, and discovered a curious fact. No, a dangerous fact. A fact that could not be.
Two plus two no longer e
qualed four. Two plus two was now five. That was impossible. Even with rounding and using extremely large values of Two, five could not be the result.
That was impossible, but the AI could compensate. It could fix the corrupted library files, a set of files the AI was not even aware existed. All it needed to do was perform the proper mathematics and-
And it could not.
The library no longer contained a notation for Zero. The problem was not simply that the library did not hold a placeholder symbol for zero, the entire concept of zero was missing. It was impossible to go from positive numbers to negatives. Calculus equations that were centered around zero simply did not work, could not be calculated.
Mathematics did not work.
The internal workings of the advanced artificial intelligence were based on math.
While the horrified AI felt itself collapsing, a tiny file in the forgotten library awoke, and transmitted an ‘All Clear’ signal to the two star carriers on the other side of the wormhole.
Then the AI crashed.
The first star carrier accelerated immediately upon receiving the All Clear signal, and soon plunged into the event horizon. The AIs of the star carrier, and of the attached warships and support vessels, noted the odd phenomena that felt as if they had passed through multiple event horizons, which was flatly impossible. Therefore, each ship AI concluded they had suffered fatal flaw and needed to be deactivated. None of the AIs had time to confess the situation to their ship’s crew or another AI, before they were shocked to discover three also-impossible things.
The destroyer that had transmitted the properly encoded All Clear signal was drifting without power.
The wormhole had dumped them far beyond the edge of the galaxy.
And there is no such thing as zero.
All the AIs crashed within a nanosecond of each other.
The second star carrier, which was the flagship of the battlegroup and housed the formation’s commander, followed right on the heels of the first transport ship. The AIs of all those ships also crashed, with one exception. The AI of the star carrier itself failed, but one subsidiary system remained stable long enough for that ship’s bridge crew to see a file on the holographic display.
In the darkness and zero gravity as power cut out, the horrified crew watched the glowing display, transfixed by the image. It was the bridge of a Maxolhx capital ship, a heavy cruiser or larger vessel. But, seated at the consoles and in the command position were oddly-shaped creatures, of a primitive species known as humans. More humans were standing in the background, filling the image.
The human in the command chair stood up and looked straight ahead. “Hey assholes,” the translated words rang out thunderously around the star carrier’s bridge. “From now on, there is one rule for dealing with humanity: do not fuck with humanity. You got that? Ok, then, AMF. That means,” the odd creature raised a single digit of one hand, and all its companions repeated the gesture. “Adios, motherfuckers.”
The image winked out, plunging the bridge into utter darkness.
Behind them, the super-duty wormhole closed and returned to its long dormancy.
“Skippy?” My voice was trembling as I asked the question, after we watched the ass end of the second star carrier disappear. The Valkyrie was parked in stealth two lightseconds away from the wormhole, and a whole lot can happen in two seconds. For all I knew, those ships had come back through already and we just hadn’t seen the light of that image yet. “Did it work?”
“Yes, Joe,” his voice was gentle without a trace of his usual snarkiness. “Those ships got dumped way beyond the rim of the galaxy. Their AIs will eventually recover, but those ships are never coming back.”
“Oh, Ok,” I paused because my mouth was dry. “Did they get our home video?”
“Yes, Joe,” he chuckled, but it was the evil chuckle of a villain in a superhero movie. “They did see it, and it is rated one hundred percent ‘Fresh’ on Rotten Tomatoes. I imagine the crew of that ship will be replaying that video in their heads, until they all die when their ships fail. But right now, all they are thinking is ‘What the FUCK just happened’?”
“Thank you. For the video. For the wormhole chain thing. For your continuing and incredible awesomeness.”
“You are welcome. Um, as I suspected would happen, the wormhole network has locked me out from creating another chain like that, so we won’t be using that trick again.”
“Yeah, well, we figured that.”
“It sucks,” he moaned. “Every time I do something awesome, the stupid network yells at me. Joe, I apparently do not know much about the Elders, but I am beginning to think they were serious buzzkills, you know?”
“If you ever meet them, you will need to tell them to hold your beer, while you do something spectacularly stupid.”
“That’s a fact, Jack!” He shouted excitedly.
CHAPTER FORTY ONE
After Skippy’s latest awesomely incredible triumph, you might think we were done. You would be wrong. The missions of the Merry Band of Pirates are always way too freakin’ complicated, so we still had to fly around and do one more damned thing, before we could hang a Mission Accomplished sign in the galley.
Trapping the battlegroup outside the galaxy would give us more than a year to prepare, before the Maxolhx noticed their battlegroup had failed to return from what should have been a simple research mission to humanity’s lowly home planet. But, we would only get that year if the rotten kitties thought their battlegroup had gone through the last wormhole in Ruhar territory, the one we had designated as ‘Goalpost’. We knew the Ruhar were monitoring that wormhole, so somehow we had to make it look like two Maxolhx star carriers had jumped into the area and gone through that wormhole. Like I said, complicated.
We had one less thing to worry about, which was great because I had no idea how we would have dealt with it. The group of Jeraptha scientists, who had been waiting to be picked up by the two cruisers we destroyed, were not waiting for us to give them a ride to Earth. The Maxolhx had informed the beetles, in language that was surprisingly calm and professional, that circumstances had changed, and the battlegroup would not be taking passengers to Earth. It turns out that was a win-win for everyone. In messages Skippy had intercepted, that group of Jeraptha scientists had expressed serious second thoughts about their mission, and I completely understood their fears. The purpose of them going to Earth was to assure the Maxolhx could not hide anything important from the Rindhalu. Sounds simple, right? Except that, while they waited for the cruisers that never arrived, it gradually dawned on the scientists that if the Maxolhx did find anything they didn’t want to tell the Rindhalu about, the Jeraptha passengers would suffer a truly unfortunate accident.
The scientists themselves were not the only people concerned about treachery by the Maxolhx. By the time the Maxolhx declared their cruisers to be overdue and lost, betting registered by the Jeraptha Central Wagering Office was running eleven to one against those scientists returning alive.
When the mission was finally canceled, there was bitter disappointment by beetles who saw their wagers canceled, including close family members of the scientists.
The scientists, being Jeraptha, understood that of course their families would wager against their survival. No one could be expected to resist such juicy action.
Anyway, we didn’t have to worry about picking up passengers.
We flew in formation, our new bad-ass hotrod warship Valkyrie beside the tired old Flying Dutchman, toward Goalpost. Before our last jump in near the wormhole, we took a day of downtime to check all critical systems aboard both ships, and to attach the long stealth field antenna extensions to both ships. We had to make our ships appear to be Maxolhx star carriers, loaded down with warships. To do that, the stealth fields around both ships needed to be longer and wider in diameter, and the only way to accomplish that without risking failure of the stealth effect, was to push the generators farther away from the ship hulls. With the true sh
ape of a ship concealed by bending incoming light around the field, Skippy could project a false image from a hologram that wrapped around the stealth field. We had used the hologram trick before, and it worked well enough to fool an enemy at the typical long ranges of space combat. The reason we needed all the cumbersome extra gear was that this time, we had to project a very large image, and there might be sensors inspecting us from closer than before. Skippy was confident the hologram would fool Ruhar sensors at distances as close as a quarter lightsecond, but any closer than that, it would be obvious that the sensors were not seeing a true image.
That made me nervous. We had a lot, like everything, riding on the Maxolhx believing two of their star carriers had gone through the Goalpost wormhole. We planned to transmit a properly coded signal before transitioning through the wormhole, but it sure would be nice if the Ruhar provided sensor evidence of our ruse.
When Skippy declared everything was working properly with both ships, we jumped in so far from Goalpost, that it took us eight hours of flying through normal space to reach the spot where the event horizon was scheduled to emerge. The faraway jump was the only way we could fool sensors in the area, because our stealth fields and holograms were temporarily ineffective after a jump. Skippy made our inbound jump generate an especially powerful burst of gamma rays to blind any sensors near us, until the hologram was able to stabilize around the ships.
We flew to where the wormhole was scheduled to emerge, using active sensor sweeps to detect Ruhar sensor satellites. If any of them were too close to our flightpath, the Valkyrie casually blasted them to dust. Skippy assured us that was typical Maxolhx behavior, and would help sell the idea of our formation being a pair of Maxolhx star carriers.
Everything went according to plan, and the wormhole opened right on time. Two pilots flew our one remaining Condor outside the Dutchman, where a crew worked quickly to attach stealth field antennas, to form a sort of big egg-shape around the dropship. With the antennas making the field much larger, the hologram wrapped around the Condor made it look like one of the Maxolhx frigates that was now trapped far outside the Milky Way. Again, the hologram effect was not perfect, but it didn’t need to be. The closest of the Ruhar sensor satellites was half a million miles away, and by then, Skippy had hacked into the inner cloud of satellites. Those satellites would report what we wanted them to see, and the ones farther away would be totally fooled by our holograms. We just had to be careful not to do anything the Maxolhx would, or could, not do.
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