"So, you can't do it?" I asked anxiously. This was our first space battle where we were the pursuing ship, it required a complete change in thinking.
"I can do it, I can't do it with the accuracy we would prefer. Fortunately, the Thuranin are still under the mistaken impression that quantum effects tend toward randomness, a common misconception of lesser developed species. Because I know how the universe really works, I've been able to map the pattern of the quantum resonators, unwind their effect from the residual wormhole signature, and make a reasonably good guess as to where that second tanker ship went. By reasonable, I mean I can tell where that ship jumped to, within six hundred thousand kilometers."
"Great!" A glance at the man bridge display told me we had plenty of charge for an immediate jump. "Program a jump for us, and we will-"
"Wait! There is some extra good news, Colonel Joe," Skippy said, "by some stroke of luck, or luck as you monkeys think of it, that second tanker is the one I infected when we flew by on our space dive, so it will be dropping off drones as it jumps. That makes it much easier to follow. I'm pinging the drones now. And, yes! Got a response. I know exactly where that ship is. Hmm, that's interesting, it's going to a secondary rendezvous point, it is supposed to go to the secondary rendezvous if there is trouble at the original rendezvous location. Oh, darn it, the tanker is probably there already, and it's supposed to remain there almost six hours. After that, the tanker's orders, if no other ships appear at the secondary rendezvous, is for it to make its way back to its base star system, using a random course. Damn it, we won't be able to use our neat trick of knowing exactly where a ship will jump in."
"No," I said slowly, while thinking. "But we do know, from the drone, pretty much exactly where that ship is now, right?"
"Within ten, twelve thousand kilometers, most likely, yes."
"Good, great. This is perfect. If that ship does escape us, I don't want it to see us trying to use that trick again. Here's what we're going to do; we jump into where that ship is, and launch missiles as soon as we clear the wormhole. We can project a damping field, right, to prevent that tanker from jumping away?"
"A weak damping field, yes, I had to disassemble much of that unit's mechanism to repair the ship. Hmmm. You are proposing we act like a real pirate ship?"
"Something like that, yeah."
"I love it! Jump course plotted and programmed in, missiles are ready for launch."
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
It almost worked like I hoped it would. Our jump to the secondary rendezvous point was spot on, we emerged within seven thousand kilometers from the tanker, better than Skippy hoped. Our missiles were away even before we detected the tanker, unfortunately that ship was on a hair trigger to jump and it fired up its jump drive as soon as it picked up the gamma ray burst of our inbound jump. Its caught the edge of our damping field, so it wasn't able to jump far, and Skippy quickly pinged the drones it dropped off. We abandoned our two missiles. even though we were running low on missiles, and jumped after the tanker within forty seconds of jumping in to the secondary rendezvous.
This time, we skipped launching precious missiles blind, and relied on our damping field. We emerged within four thousand kilometers, the tanker tried to jump, but at that distance, it was trapped, an attempted jump would have ripped apart its jump drive coils and effectively destroyed the tanker for us. The tanker crew didn't have the magic of Skippy working for them. With the tanker unable to jump away, it was a straight up firefight, a tanker against a partly rebuilt star carrier.
"Weapons free," I ordered, and the CIC crew responded by locking maser cannons on target and hammering away at the tanker's defensive shields with sizzling beam hits. After only a couple seconds, the tanker's shields and proximity sensors were so degraded, that we felt confident enough to launch a pair of missiles. The tanker's point defense systems knocked out one missile regardless, Skippy was impressed by the Thuranin's accuracy. No matter, our second missile scored a direct hit on a reactor, and there was a spectacular explosion. An explosion, right after the tanker launched a pair of its own missiles at us, at extremely close range.
"Missiles inbound!" Chang warned from the CIC.
My eyes flashed to the display, the enemy missiles were so close, our own point defense systems had engaged. Before I could say anything, Desai initiated a short jump away from the missiles and tanker debris, on her own authority, under the rules for space combat maneuvers. We emerged only eight hundred thousand kilometers away, safely out of missile range for now. "Is there anything left of that ship?"
The CIC crew was silent for a moment. "It's hard to tell, Captain, there is a big cloud from the fuel load that tanker was carrying, its tanks ruptured. Until the cloud disperses, we can't see-"
"Oh, for crying out loud, you monkeys will take forever," Skippy complained. "The answer is yes, Joe, the forward section of that ship is still partly intact, and even I can't tell if anyone is left alive in there. Their computer core is in that section, it would be wise for us to not leave that behind."
"Agreed. Colonel Chang, one more missile, please, let's clean up after ourselves. We shouldn't leave part of that ship drifting around out here, it's a hazard to navigation."
"Certainly, sir," Chang replied with a tight grin.
Having taken care of the four ships, we now needed to clean up after the flight recorder drones they had ejected. Because three of the ships had been hit with no warning, they had not been able to launch more than a few drones. The last ship had apparently scattered drones along its route; that ship’s captain must have known he was in serious trouble. I asked Skippy to ping for a drone in the immediate area.
"Transmitting signal now,” Skippy reported. “The signal, and the reply message, crawl along at the speed of light, don't expect an instant response."
"We figured that, Skippy," I said. It still felt odd to be waiting for something that traveled at the speed of light. On any human scale, light speed was instantaneous.
"Got it!" Skippy shouted excitedly a few seconds later. "We're too far away for me to hack directly into the drone. Pilot, I loaded the coordinates into the nav system."
"Captain?" Desai asked.
"Take us there, pilot," I ordered.
Desai gave me a thumbs up and her fingers flew over the controls. In the past, Skippy would have programmed the autopilot to take us to the drone, and all Desai would have done was press a button to engage the autopilot. Now, we monkeys were skilled enough to program the autopilot ourselves, or fly the ship manually, as Desai was doing. Flying manually was good practice for combat maneuvers. When we arrived close enough to the drone, Desai matched course with it while Skippy did, whatever magical AI thing it was he did.
"Okeydokey. Done with that one, it's gone silent again," Skippy reported.
"Great. Pilot, take us far enough away from the drone for a safe jump."
"Whoa!" Skippy warned. "Another jump already? What are you doing, monkey?"
"Jumping to the next set of coordinates, wherever that ship dropped off a drone." It seemed fairly obvious to me.
"No, no, no, no, no, no. We're not done here, dumdum. That was only one drone. Thuranin ships typically drop off drones in sets of three, in case one or two drones are destroyed by whatever threat caused the ship to eject drones."
"Damn it. Why didn't you tell us that? Hey, wait. You sent out the signal, and only one drone pinged us its location."
"Duh. Each drone in a set of three has a priority, the primary drone responds first. If the primary drone doesn't respond, the secondary drone does, and so on. And after one drone responds, any other drone in the set will no longer respond to the original retrieval signal, they switch to another retrieval code."
"Great, fine. You have that other retrieval code, right?"
"Nope, I didn't have time to download the full set of codes. But any Thuranin ship that comes looking for the drones will have the full set of codes."
"Damn it! We're screwed, you little shi
thead. Why didn't you tell us that?" I was pissed, so were the crew in the CIC. "Now we've got three drones out there, two of them contain their ship's real flight logs, the Thuranin will know somebody screwed with the data in that one drone. I know you are absent-minded sometimes, but this is inexcusable, Skippy. You can't do-"
"Joey, as entertaining as this rant is, and I'm sure you were winding up for a full-blown award winning diatribe aimed at me, please cool your jets a minute. I didn't mention not having downloaded the other codes, because I don't need a copy of them. The Thuranin are unimaginative and predictable, I can figure out the what other codes must be, based on their pattern. And, mmm, yes, I sent my test retrieval code, and another drone just responded. We're good, pilot, the drone's location is in the nav system."
He was right, I was winding up for a good old-fashioned rant about is forgetfulness, now I was pissed because I felt cheated out of yelling at him. "You just love yanking my chain, don't you, Skippy?"
"Hey, it gets back for all the times you make me feel foolish. Payback is a bitch, buddy-boy. Anywho, we're good, we can find the other drones and alter their flight logs also. Mission will soon be accomplished, Joe! Too bad we don't have any fresh bananas to celebrate with."
Damn, locating all those drones was tedious, it took us four full days for Skippy to be absolutely confident he had located all of them.
"That's it, we're done," Skippy announced. "The last drone now contains the altered version of the flight logs. I suggest we skedaddle out of here, on the tiny chance a Thuranin ship happens to already be searching for the surveyor and its escorts."
"Right, good idea. Pilot, set course for Earth," I announced happily.
"What?" Skippy exclaimed in surprise. "Our mission isn't done, Joe. I know we-"
"This SpecOps mission is over, Skippy. UNEF Command sent us on this fool's errand, with the assumption that our home planet was safe, because the wormhole was shut down. Now we know that shutting down our local wormhole has only made Earth somewhat more safe than it was, not entirely safe. UNEF, and our governments back home, need to know that. I report to them, not to you. I want the fastest course back to Earth, that won't take us through any dangerous areas."
"Whoa! You're making that decision without checking with me first? Good luck getting the jump drive to remain calibrated all the way back to Earth, without me."
"Do I command this ship or not, Skippy?"
"Depends-"
"Command must be an absolute, Skippy. This is a simple yes, or no."
There was a pause. Longer than I was comfortable with. "Yes," he said finally.
"Look, Skippy, I told you that we would help you find your magic radio, and we will. Think about what we've seen out here. A previously unknown Elder site that has a big mysterious hole scooped out of it. An entire civilization that is extinct because their planet was moved by Elder technology, after the Elders supposedly left this galaxy. An Elder AI that is now a dead lump of metal. Comm nodes that don't connect to a network. A moon that was completely vaporized. Is contacting the Collective still your biggest priority, or should we try to get some answers, before you go knocking on the Collective's door?"
He gave that heartfelt sigh that was by now familiar to me. "You're right, you're right. I do have a lot to think about, and I need more data. Besides, you monkeys have done a good job out here, and you all deserve a big bunch of fresh bananas."
Damn it, even when he was being nice, he was an asshole.
With the mission complete, and my duty shift on the bridge over, I headed to the galley to get a cup of coffee. On the way, I asked Skippy a question that had been bugging me for hours. "Hey, Skippy, why didn't we use these super-duper quantum resonator things, when we were being chased by a whole squadron of Thuranin destroyers? We have resonators aboard, right?"
"We have resonators aboard, yes. We didn't deploy them at the time, because they wouldn't have been much use, Joe. We were only capable of microjumps then, with short jumps like that, both ends of the wormhole are so close in real space, it is almost impossible to mask their connection. Also, our jump drive was so badly out of calibration, each jump was like ringing a bell that could be heard halfway across the galaxy. Trying to mask that with quantum resonators would have been like throwing stones into the ocean during a hurricane; sure, there are some extra ripples in the water, they're not going to affect the waves."
"Oh."
"Duh. If I thought it would have helped, I would have launched our quantum resonators, we have almost a hundred of them. Or we had almost a hundred, I needed to use most of them to rebuild the ship. Now we have three of them left."
"Three? Only three?"
"You wanted me to fix the ship or not?"
"Sorry, Skippy, I know you did an amazing, incredible job, all by yourself."
"Hmmf," he snorted. "You have no idea how amazing. I had to build machines to create exotic matter, that your monkey brains can't even imagine. And I'm still waiting for that cake you promised me, back when you were on Newark."
Crap. I'd forgotten. What did an AI want with a cake? Was I supposed to make a cake out of metallic helium 3 for him? "Skippy, I'm sorry," a word I was using too often, "I completely forgot your cake, with all the crap that went on after we left Newark behind. I will bake a very special cake for dinner, tonight. I'm headed to the galley right now, anyway."
"Great! Everyone can enjoy cake, and sit around talking about how awesome I am, even though you monkeys can't truly appreciate the full gloriously awesome extent of my awesomeness. Hey, I just composed a song you can sing in my honor. I call it 'Skippy the Magnificent'. It goes like this 'Skippy, oh, Skippy, we monkeys are so unworthy, you are so awesome'-"
"Skippy! How about we monkeys enjoy eating cake, while talking about how awesome it is that we've been able to resist the strong urge to toss you out an airlock?"
"That'll work also."
We did have cake that night, I baked four cakes, enough to feed everyone. Two chocolate, because chocolate was always a favorite, a lemon cake, and a strawberry roll with whipped-cream icing. Damn, that strawberry roll was gone so fast, I could have made a dozen of them and still not had enough. And, yes, people did help me with the baking, I didn't want to risk screwing the cakes up by myself. We gathered everyone in the galley, except for the six people on duty in the bridge and CIC, the mood was festive. Word that our mission had been successful, and more important, that we were going home, had raced around the ship. I dropped a hint to Major Simms that it would be more than Ok with me if she had violated regulations, and smuggled some champagne or wine aboard. Champagne wasn't something I drank more than two or three times in my life, and I wasn't sure that I liked it, but it seemed appropriate for such an important celebration. Alcohol aboard ship was against the rules, as if the rules mattered, in a stolen alien starship, two thousand lightyears from Earth. After we 'd taken care of the last drone, and I ordered us to head back to Earth, we jumped several times, and were now nearly two lightyears away from the battle zone. Our jump drive coils were fully charged, the stealth field was operating perfectly, we were in deep interstellar space. Skippy said the odds of any ship stumbling across us out here were so small, he didn't bother to give me an estimate. I felt safe, safe that letting the crew have some fun, and blow off steam, was fully in order. We'd endured harsh conditions on Newark, and almost from the moment we came back on board, we'd been engaged full time in the effort to prevent the surveyor ship from reaching Earth.
Simms shook her head, saying no, she hadn't smuggled any alcohol aboard. That disappointed me, I'd been hoping our logistics officer had thought of that, until I realized I was being very unfair to her. Simms had a mountain of more important things on her mind in the scramble before we left Earth, if I as the commander had wanted to skirt regulations, I should have taken that upon myself.
Simms saw the flash of disappointment on my face, and took pity on me. "I personally did not load any alcohol aboard with our supply shipments, sir
, however," she said with a wink, "it is possible that people brought their own."
At that cue, the French team, who were responsible for working in the galley that day, pulled a towel off a tub, and exposed four bottles of champagne, chilling on a bed of ice. "Champagne, compliments of France. Colonel, that is," Giraud said, "if this is acceptable aboard a United Nations warship?"
"Captain," I replied, "as the United Nations has never before had a warship, we can start our own traditions. I believe that in the future, champagne should be mandatory."
That remark drew cheers from the assembled group. Giraud and Chang popped the corks on all four bottles, and the party started. As there were no wine glasses aboard the ship, we made do with plastic cups. At some point, people clamored for a speech, so I stood on a chair. "In case anyone has not heard, we are going home!" Wild cheering ensued. "Every one of us is coming home, we didn't lose a single person. Lest we forget," I almost paused, because 'lest' is not a word I'd used before in my life, that must be the champagne talking. "I'd like to take a moment to review what we have accomplished out here." Mild groans from the crowd. "I will be brief, I promise! First, we didn't blow up the ship. Yet." That drew a laugh. "The Thuranin almost did that for us, but we survive humanity's first space battle. We landed on an alien planet, the first alien planet for most of us, and we survived there. We traveled across the surface of that planet, part of the way on foot, and defeated an enemy who initially had the advantage of air power and numbers." I didn't mention that both the comm node and AI we found there were dead, this speech was not a time for downers. "We destroyed a Kristang ship in orbit, without that ship even knowing humans were in the star system. And then, when we thought we were safely back aboard the Dutchman and all we had to do was look for another comm node, we discovered that our home planet was in danger. And, I am pleased, very pleased, to say, that threat to Earth has been eliminated, without this ship being put at serious risk. I call that a success, people!"
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 48