This particular yellow dwarf star we investigated was about seven percent larger than our sun, but slightly cooler, it was older and, according to Skippy and our science team, closer to the end of its life, having burned a lot of its hydrogen supply. Our science team couldn't decide what they were more excited about, the possibility of recovering Elder artifacts, or getting a close look at an older G-type star with the Flying Dutchman's sophisticated sensors.
We followed our now-routine procedure; the Dutchman jumped to the edge of the star system, and the Flower jumped in to recon gas giant moons. Although this star system could have supported life, it had only two lifeless rocky inner planets, neither of which orbited in the Goldilocks zone. There were three gas giants, the Flower was first going to check the biggest one, a planet thirty percent more massive than Jupiter. If there was no Elder site on a moon around the largest planet, the Flower would return to check in with us, then proceed to investigate the other two gas giants.
The Flower returned exactly on time, to report excitedly they had detected a possible Elder facility on a small moon, and no sign the place had been ransacked already. Skippy figured someone, at some time, must have checked out the system, because it had a G-type star, but once it was determined the system had no habitable planets, no one had bothered to look any closer. This time, I was hoping, we would hit the jackpot.
The Flower docked again, we waited for her crew to rejoin us while Skippy analyzed that ship's sensor data. "Looks good, Skippy?" I asked.
"It's hard to tell anything, with that ship's crappy Kristang sensors," he complained. When we'd taken the frigate, when we had captured an alien starship, I'd thought that was the most awesome thing that could ever happen. Since then, Skippy had explained that the Flower had been purchased third-hand by the White Wind clan, that her sensors were in bad condition, long obsolete even by Kristang standards, and the ship overall had been poorly maintained in the past decade. "The stupid scanners keep drifting out of calibration, I can barely tell whether I'm looking at a moon or empty space."
"The sensors again, yup, I hear you." Man, I was tired of listening to Skippy complain about the equipment he had to work with. "Did they find a potential Elder site, or not?"
"With this sensor data, it could be an Elder science facility, or it could be an alien car wash, I can't tell for sure."
"Fine, we'll know when we take the Dutchman in. Any sign of other ships?"
"No. Again, it's hard to tell anything, the Flower is practically blind. It doesn't help that this planet has an extremely powerful magnetic field, there is so much noise in the sensor data that the Thuranin could hide a whole stealthed fleet there, and the Flower wouldn't have seen it."
"Colonel Chang?" I asked, he had returned from commanding the frigate and was standing beside me.
Chang knew Skippy's low opinion of the frigate. "We didn't detect any threats. I recommend we jump in with the Dutchman."
"Skippy?" I asked.
The shiny beer can sighed. "Yeah, sure, I agree, why not? We can always jump back out."
He was going to regret saying that.
We all were.
Skippy programmed a jump that took us within easy dropship range from the Elder site; close enough for the Dutchman's sensors to thoroughly scan the site, far enough way that the moon's gravity wouldn't affect a jump away. "Jump successful," Desai reported, then turned to look at me. "We emerged within forty meters of the intended target," she said and shook her head in amazement. Forty meters! Our best human-programmed jump was fifty thousand kilometers off target. Our scientists said the theoretical best that was possible was nine thousand kilometers, that some kind of quantum uncertainty made it impossible to get any closer, the laws of physics didn't provide any way to be more accurate. Yet Skippy always got us within a hundred meters, usually much closer. He said quantum mechanics was uncertain only if you took into account one layer of spacetime, another thing that had our science team scratching their heads.
"Congratulations, Skippy, another great jump," I said.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm amazing the monkeys yet again. I'll take a bow later. Scanning now. By the way, the jump accuracy was thirty seven meters, not forty. Hmm, there is really an unusual level of interference from the magnetic- NO! Pilot get us out of here nownownow!!"
Desai didn't hesitate, her finger had already been poised on the button to jump away. On the main display I saw the symbol for a jump point forming, a split second from the ship being pulled into the jump wormhole it was generating.
Skippy shouted again, "Belay tha-"
Too late. The Dutchman jumped. Or tried to. The whole ship vibrated so badly, it felt like my teeth were going to shake loose. There was a screeching, screaming, tearing sound like the ship was being torn apart. The lights and displays flickered, the deck dropped away from me then slammed me back in the chair, as the artificial gravity cut out and came back on. There were so many warning symbols flashing on the displays it wasn't worth me trying to read them, and nothing we could do about it that Skippy wasn't already taking care of. To my uneducated eyes, instead of jumping far outside the system we had only done a microjump, the moon we intended to investigate was still on the corner of the display. "Skippy, what happened?" I asked, to my credit my voice was calm and only loud enough to be heard over other people shouting, alarms beeping, and the ship's structure flexing and groaning with terrifying noises. In the background was the battle stations alarm from Star Trek, which I had forgotten Sergeant Adams had programmed into the ship’s systems.
"A Thuranin destroyer squadron, five ships and we jumped in close to them, they got us partly caught in a damping field. Our attempted jump blew seventeen percent of our drive coils, it would have been worse but I cut power as we got pulled into the wormhole, the wormhole was collapsing on us anyway. We should jump again as soon as possible," as he spoke I noticed the main display showed we had a sixty three percent charge in the jump drive capacitors, "there will be a delay as I take the burned-out coils offline and recalibrate the drive."
"How long?"
"I estima- uh, oh, they found us again, two destroyers just jumped in. They're targeting us with maser beams. And six missiles."
"Defensive systems on full auto!" I ordered to the crew in the CIC. The Thuranin computer system that Skippy had upgraded would have to protect us from the inbound missiles, no way could any human react fast enough to hit a missile. "Pilot, you know what to do."
"Aye aye," Desai said tightly from the lefthand seat. As she went to full thrust on the ship's normal-space engines to dodge the destroyers' particle beams, the ship rocked.
"Particle beam hit." Skippy reported flatly, as the ship rocked again, harder this time. "Another hit. Shields compensating."
"Should we shoot back?" I asked. The answer seemed obvious, I wanted to check with Skippy anyway.
"Affirmative, it will keep those destroyers from getting closer. The three other destroyers have jumped in, we're surrounded. They're firing weapons."
"Weapons free," I ordered, and the display showed our particle beam cannons firing back. "How soon can we jump?"
"Not soon enough, they're projecting a damping field again," Skippy said. "We're not ready but we don't have a choice, we need to get out of here before that damping field reaches full strength. Jump option Echo."
Echo. That was a microjump, Skippy must not have confidence the ship could handle a bigger distance. That was bad. Those destroyers would be right on top of us again. "Pilot,” I ordered, “engage jump option Echo."
This wasn't a fight against low-tech Kristang ships, this was the Dutchman against equivalent technology, against true warships designed to be in combat. Our star carrier by contrast was a bus, a high-tech bus but a bus anyway.
It was a nightmare. We jumped and jumped again, trying to get away. It wasn't working, the destroyers always found us quickly, sometimes only two, sometimes all five surrounded us and pounded our shields. Desai did her best to keep the enemy guessin
g where we were and Skippy said she was doing a good job, the problem was that the enemy had multiple, data-linked sensor platforms, and we couldn't dodge their particle beams for more than a couple seconds before they adjusted aim and hit us again. Our automatic defenses were knocking missiles out of the sky left and right, each volley of missiles got closer and closer to us, as our sensors were degraded by flashback from particle beams impacting our shields.
It wasn't working, with each jump we blew more drive coils, even when the Thuranin weren't able to get a damping field established, because Skippy never had time to recalibrate the jump drive, and every time we lost drive coils the system fell further out of calibration.
It wasn't working, we weren't getting out of this one. The crew knew it; I could see it on their faces. Shields were strained to the limit, particle beams were partially bleeding through, they were targeting the aft engineering section of the ship to hit our reactors and jump drive coils. Twenty one minutes into the running battle, we lost our first reactor, it was damaged and Skippy had to shut it down. With that reactor gone, the other five struggled to power the stealth field, the shields, the particle beams and to recharge the jump drive capacitors. Without asking me, Skippy had dropped artificial gravity to one third power and shut down all nonessential systems.
It wasn't working.
The Flying Dutchman shuddered again, with sounds of groaning and the terrifying shriek of metal composites being torn apart. The displays on the bridge flickered, and the air was filled with alarm bells and klaxons from almost every system. "Skippy! Get us out of-"
The ship shook violently again. "Direct hit on Number Four reactor," Skippy announced calmly, "reactor has lost containment. I am preparing it for ejection. Ejection system is offline. Pilot, portside thrusters full emergency thrust on my mark."
"Ready," Desai acknowledged in as calm a voice as she could manage.
"Mark. Go!" Skippy shouted.
Whatever they were doing, it was more than the ship's already stressed artificial gravity and inertial compensation systems could handle, normally ship maneuvers were not felt at all by the crew. This time, I lurched in the command chair and had to hang on, as the ship was flung to the right. There was a shudder, actually a wave of ripples traveling along the ship's spine, accompanied by a deep harmonic groaning. No ship should ever make a sound like that.
"Ah, damn it. Reactor Four is away, it impacted Reactor Two on the way out, shutting down Two now." Skippy's voice had a touch of strain to it. "Missiles inbound. Diverting all remaining power to jump drive capacitors. Hang on, this is going to be close."
The main display indicated the jump drive was at a 38% charge, Skippy had told us that with the Dutchman trapped inside the Thuranin destroyer squadron's damping field, we needed a 42% charge for even a short jump, and that still carried a severe risk of rupturing the drive. If that happened, we would never know it, we'd simply be dead between one picosecond and another.
The missile symbols on the display, seven of them, were coming in fast. Two of the symbols disappeared as I watched, destroyed by our ship's point defense particle beams. The other five missiles continued toward us, fast, fuzzing our sensors with their stealth fields and weaving as they bored in. One more missile destroyed. Four still moving fast.
Jump drive at 40%.
Too close.
I turned the knob to release the plastic cover over the self-destruct button, and turned to look through the glass wall into the CIC compartment. "Colonel Chang."
He nodded, and I saw him flip back the cover to the other self-destruct button, the confirmation. "Sir." He looked me straight in the eye, and saluted.
I returned the salute. "Colonel Chang, we have been down a long, strange road together. It's been an honor serving with you." My left thumb hovered over the self-destruct button. The ship was dying anyway. This was my fault. How the hell had I gotten us into this mess?
The ship rocked again from another sizzling particle beam hit.
"Skippy," I said, "I'm sorry. Good luck to-"
Skippy interrupted me. "Jump option Delta, do it now."
Jump drive still at only 40%, I didn't argue. "Pilot, engage jump option Delta."
Never before had I seen or felt a jump. Something had gone very, very wrong with this jump, the ship seemed to ripple and distort in my vision, it almost went transparent for a split second, and I had a flash of stomach-wrenching nausea. In the CIC, I could see one guy wiping his mouth after puking on the console. He hadn't lost focus for a moment.
"Skippy, what the hell was that?"
"I calculated at least one of those missiles was going to slip through our defenses, and our shields can't make a direct hit, so we jumped early. And I distorted spacetime to throw us off our original emergence point, that was, I'll leave out the details, it was, let's just say it was very bad for the jump drive. The good news is the Thuranin will be delayed finding us again. I think."
"Long enough to recalibrate the jump drive, so we can get out of here for real?"
"No, long enough for plan B. Joe, I need you to come get me and bring me to the Flower, don't argue, we can talk along the way. Let's go."
Pulling the latch on the seat belt open, I dashed around the chair, and barely paused long enough to tell Chang he had the conn, before I ran into the corridor and bounced off the opposite wall. The low gravity made me clumsy, there were more bumps and scrapes before I reached the escape pod where we kept Skippy. He was sitting right where I'd left him, of course, being unable to move on his own. We kept Skippy there so that, if we had to self-destruct the ship, he would have a chance to get away before the nuke exploded. Hopefully some enemy ship would be curious enough to take the escape pod aboard their ship. In addition to Skippy, the escape pod held the communications node we'd taken from the Kristang research base, the comm node was there as bait. Any ship scanning the escape pod would identify the comm node as a valuable Elder device, even if they didn't know what Skippy truly was. "Hi, Skippy," I said as I pulled him out of the crude receptacle we'd built for him. Although Skippy could talk with me, and see me, anywhere on the ship, I made a point to stop by the escape pod once a day to check on him. he made jokes about a monkey smelling up the escape pod, but I think he appreciated my effort. "What's the plan?" I asked as I tucked him under one arm like a football and ran back down the corridor to the tram that ran down the Dutchman's spine.
"The plan is," he explained as I stepped into the tram and held on tightly, "you get me into the Flower and set the navigation system and jump drive on a timer, then you get back here."
"Wha-whoa." The tram took off at jackrabbit speed, I didn't know it could move that fast. "Ow!" I lost my grip on the handrail, and fell back to whack my head on the door frame, hard enough to draw blood. "Crap, Skippy, warn me when you do something like that. You want to get further away before I blow up the Dutchman?"
"No, dumdum, I'm trying to avoid you having to blow up your ship at all. You monkeys are dumb as a stump, and you smell bad but I've become fond of you, damn it, now that I've got you out here I feel responsible for you, like a smelly stray dog you find on the side of a road. You can't leave it there, and then you're stuck with it."
"How is you running away supposed to help us, genius? Without you with us, we'll never get the jump drive recalibrated, and that destroyer squadron will be on us again in a heartbeat."
"Oh yee of little faith, Joe, you should be ashamed of yourself. I loaded a submind in the Thuranin computer to recalibrate the jump drive and run the ship's systems, the submind is almost as dumb as you, because I wasn't able to squeeze anything useful into the crappy Thuranin memory banks. It'll be good enough for what you need. Joe, if this works, the Thuranin will chase the Flower, and the Flying Dutchman has at least a chance to escape." The tram lurched to a stop and the door slid open. "Get in the elevator and hang on, it's going to be a fast ride."
"How do you figure we can get away?"
"Simple Skippy magic. I'll program the
Flower's autopilot to detach, fly away at maximum burn and perform a series of jumps. You set the autopilot on a timer for me, then you get back aboard the Dutchman. We'll jump at the same time, in different directions, and just before you jump away, I'll distort spacetime to throw you much further away than your drive can pull you with those degraded coils. The distortion will also make it more difficult for the Thuranin to detect the other end of your jump point. You've seen me distort spacetime before, what you haven't seen is that I can distort the fabric of space much more severely if I'm not inside the distortion field, so when I do it from outside the Dutchman, the effect will be magnified. Also, I will modify the Flower's jump signature to match the Dutchman, and make my outbound jump point stay open longer than usual, the Thuranin will likely detect that first, and hopefully follow me instead of you. Joe, I'm not going to lie, the odds are against you escaping from the Thuranin without me, that's still better than you blowing up the ship."
The elevator was slowing and it approached the platform where the Flower rested, I assumed Skippy was already getting the frigate warmed up for flight. "Any chance is better than zero chance. What's going to happen to you?"
"I expect the Thuranin will trap the Flower in a damping field after a few jumps, and either they'll blow up the ship, or it will be destroyed by trying to jump inside the field."
"That's no good, Skippy." He needed to work on his planning. "You'll survive, sure, to, what, drift in space forever?" The elevator stopped, the door opened and I stepped aboard the Flower.
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 17