Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  “But, honey,” Cleeturss pleaded, “this is juicy action. You don’t want to get in on this one?”

  “We are in this,” Thelmer stroked her husband’s face with an antenna. “Our part of the wager is the back pay and wagers we are already owed and will collect if we find the Deal Me In. Plus, our ship owners are cutting us in for thirty percent, for our labor.”

  “Thirty?” Ammarie screeched, outraged. “Five! Five percent.”

  The two women argued back and forth, with their men wisely staying out of the way. Cleeturss went to the galley and got two glasses of cold burgoze for himself and Vinny, and they whispered to arrange a bet on what percentage the women would agree to. When Ammarie and Thelmer grudgingly touched antennas to agree on twelve point three percent, Cleeturss smiled and took a sip of burgoze, having won his wager.

  “Now we are all agreed,” Vinny’s tone was sour, for he wished Ammarie had negotiated more forcefully. Privately, he would have agreed to cut the crew members in for seventeen percent, so settling for just over twelve was a victory. He enjoyed watching Ammarie in action, but he hated losing a wager to her brother.

  “Yes.” Ammarie’s expression was less than happy. “We only have one problem.”

  “What’s that?” Cleeturss bent an antenna back to scratch the nape of his neck.

  “We have no idea where to look for a single, lost, star carrier.”

  “I do,” Vinny winked with more than a hint of smugness.

  “You? When our entire fleet has no idea where that ship might have gone?”

  “Our fleet is powerful, victorious and well-managed. They are also not good at thinking beyond their training. The fleet does not know where the Deal Me In went, so they assume they can’t know. We are going to figure out where the ship might have gone, check those places one by one until we find a flight recorder buoy or some other evidence to lead us to that ship.”

  “Where it might have gone? Fleet stated that star carrier was on detached service, carrying a training group. Their plans were flexible, they could have gone anywhere.”

  “No, not anywhere. Most places they could have gone were safe, and we wouldn’t be searching for them now. Wherever they went, they ran into trouble, unexpected trouble. Something happened, they saw something to pull them out of their training routine. Whatever they saw, it wasn’t serious enough to cancel the training exercise and report to a relay station. It had to be something that sparked their curiosity, but wasn’t immediately seen as a serious threat.”

  “What? You want us to guess?” Ammarie asked with an anxiety informed by long experience with Vinny’s schemes.

  “No, I want us to review the data we have. The fleet won’t send us any more data than they included in the wager, so we need to search elsewhere.”

  “Like,” Cleeturss scratched his head with an antenna, “where?”

  “We start here,” Vinny grinned, knowing he had hooked his audience. “We know the Deal Me In passed by this relay station.”

  “Yes, and?” Thelmer was skeptical, having fallen victim to many of Vinny’s half-baked schemes over the years. “There are thirteen star systems within range of that relay station, plus two wormholes.”

  “True. But, the Glando system,” Vinny tapped the display with one antenna, “was among the first to be hit by the Bosphuraq. Before you tell me that information is worthless, yes, we also know from our garrison at Glando that no star carrier arrived, until a fleet squadron four days ago. We do know the fleet suspects the Bosphuraq refueled in this red dwarf system, before the attack on Glando. There is an automated sensor picket station orbiting a gas giant around that red dwarf, and one of our recon ships reported that station is now offline.”

  “So?”

  “What if a Ruhar ship attached to the Deal Me In jumped into that red dwarf system and noticed the picket station was offline? Investigating a minor mystery like that would be a good training exercise.”

  “Ah,” Ammarie’s head bobbed excitedly.

  “Again, so?” Cleeturss hadn’t caught on yet. “If we find debris from Ruhar ships, their government would pay us for the information, but that doesn’t win the bet for us. We need to find the Deal Me In, and the star carrier would have remained outside the system.”

  “If Ruhar ships were destroyed there, we should find flight recorder drones in the debris field,” Ammarie explained patiently for her partner. “Those drones will tell us where the ship planned to rendezvous with the star carrier. We do have the codes to make those Ruhar drones respond to us, at least for the limited data set we need. The Deal Me In should have moved on from that rendezvous point as soon as the Ruhar ships were aboard, but once the crew realized they were in a potential combat situation, they would have dropped off drones to report their planned course. We will query those drones and follow that course. Now that we are officially on a search and rescue mission for the fleet, we also have the codes for fleet drones.”

  “That is it?” Cleeturss was not persuaded. “What if we don’t find anything in this red dwarf system?”

  “There are two more possibilities I can think of,” Vinny glared at his brother-in-law. “We keep going.”

  “Hopping around enemy-controlled space until we find something, or we are caught by a Bosphuraq task force?” Cleeturss leaned forward on his front legs, ignoring his wife stroking the back of his neck to calm him. “That is your plan?”

  “You understand why the fleet offered such generous terms on the wager, don’t you? Because it is dangerous.”

  “We’ll do it,” Thelmer said before Cleeturss could respond.

  The Sure Thing did not find any debris or evidence of a battle in the red dwarf system where the automated picket station had stopped functioning. No flight recorder drones responded to their pings, but they did detect gamma ray bursts from enemy ships, too many enemy ships. Stretching their luck until it nearly broke, they hopped around the system waiting for drones to respond, then jumped far away when a Thuranin destroyer got too close for comfort.

  The second possibility on their search list, the one Vinny thought had the least promise, paid off for their risk. Vinny grumbled because Thelmer had placed and won a side bet that the second site would provide the data they needed, but he could not argue with success.

  The second site was nothing more than an imaginary point in space, designated for civilian ships to wait for a star carrier in case of an emergency in the Bardek system, close to the former border of Thuranin territory. Bardek itself was barely worth the attention of the enemy, having no habitable planets and being useful only for an asteroid field rich in rare elements, but any attackers wanting to push farther into Jeraptha territory needed to secure their flanks by taking Bardek first. The rendezvous site where the Sure Thing jumped in was actually the second backup location for civilian ships to rendezvous, and because it was so far from Bardek, a ship would need to be in severe distress to go all the way there. Vinny’s logic had been to check that site first, because a sudden Bosphuraq attack on Bardek would certainly be considered a severe emergency.

  The Sure Thing’s sensors, one of the few shipboard systems in proper working order, picked up a large debris field, mostly broken Ruhar ships but also the remains of a single Jeraptha cargo transport ship. Pinging for a Jeraptha drone was fruitless, either the cargo transport did not have time to eject its flight recorder data, or the drone had been destroyed. While warships carried drones with sophisticated stealth capabilities, civilian ships could rarely afford, and rarely would need, such unnecessary luxuries. Pinging for Ruhar military drones was more useful, they got replies from a half-dozen ships, and the drones all told slightly different versions of the same tragic story.

  Ruhar ships on a routine training mission away from the Deal Me In had detected mysterious gamma ray bursts, and when they returned, the star carrier was sufficiently curious to halt the training exercise and launch two recon task forces, but not sufficiently alarmed to entirely break off from its mission and c
ontact the Jeraptha fleet directly. The Deal Me In had dropped off two groups of Ruhar ships, one group at the rendezvous point where the Sure Thing had jumped in. Those unfortunate Ruhar ships had been ambushed by a force of Wurgalan ships, supported by a single Bosphuraq battlecruiser.

  “Some Ruhar ships escaped. We have the coordinates where they were scheduled to meet the star carrier?” Vinny asked distractedly, his concentration on the sensors, wary of booby-traps left behind by the enemy.

  “We do,” Ammarie confirmed. “We should get out of here.”

  “Wait!” Cleeturss waved both his arms and antenna. “We are going to jump into a rendezvous point where a military star carrier may have been destroyed? We should think about this first.”

  “Agreed, brother, I have thought about it.” Ammarie pressed a button on the console in front of her, and the Sure Thing jumped.

  There were no enemy ships waiting at the rendezvous point, only a drone dropped off by the Deal Me In before it had jumped to pick up the second group of Ruhar ships. This time, Vinny hesitated while their ship’s jump coils recharged. “Darling, we are on the trail of the Deal Me In, that is far more than our fleet accomplished. Maybe we should contact the fleet and let them take the search from here. They’ll cut us in for twenty percent, maybe.”

  “Hmmf,” Ammarie sniffed. “They’ll cut us out, you mean. We do all the hard work, and now you want to let the fleet take eighty percent of our wager?”

  “We know the Deal Me In wasn’t destroyed here, so every place we jump following that ship, the more likely it is we run into trouble,” Vinny almost pleaded, having suddenly lost his appetite for risk. “If we get caught in a damping field, we get cut out of a hundred percent.”

  “Dearest,” Ammarie took a breath to give herself patience, as she often did when dealing with her partner. “Twenty percent is not enough to pay off our debts, plus the fines we’ve racked up. It’s all or nothing. If we contact the fleet now, even if we get twenty percent, we lose this ship and we’ll be on the run. Again. Do you want that?”

  “No,” Vinny hated being convinced he was wrong, especially because in this case he had thought contacting the fleet was what Ammarie wanted. “Thelmer, Cleeturss, the only way you’re getting what we already owe you is if we follow this through.”

  Vinny’s brother-in-law surprised him. “We want our cut. I know it’s risky, but, we’ve come this far, dang it, and now I just have to know what happened to that ship.”

  Vinny was all for taking risk if there was a potential payoff, but since the jump to follow the Deal Me In involved risk with not much corresponding reward, he directed the ship to jump in far enough away that his ship had a decent chance to escape if enemy ships were in the area. He was excited and he knew his three companions were equally eager to see if the lost star carrier was at the rendezvous point. The best case would be for the Deal Me In to be found intact, merely suffering some engineering failure and unable to jump, with the attached Ruhar ships lacking range to jump all the way to the nearest occupied star system or relay station to call for help. The worst case would be to find a debris field surrounded by enemy ships, where the Sure Thing would be trapped and destroyed.

  With the rotten luck he had recently, and by ‘recently’ Vinny meant most of his adult life, he was not betting on a best-case scenario.

  “No enemy ships, or ships of any kind,” Ammarie reported soon after the sensors reset from the jump. “Unless they’re in stealth,” she added without needing to. They all understood the ship’s sensors, which exceeded even the capabilities of the gear aboard the ship when it was a frontline star carrier in fleet service, could not quickly detect ships encased in stealth fields. She set the passive sensors to search for the faint ripples sometimes detectable when a stealthed ship passed in front of a star, and powered up the active sensor field. The gamma rays of their inbound jump had lit up the area like a strobe light, there was no point trying to remain quiet. “Oh, this is not good. I’m picking up debris, a lot of it.”

  “Pinging for flight recorder drones, ours and Ruhar. I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Vinny kept one antenna poised over the emergency jump button while his fingers flew over the controls.

  “All systems ready to jump on your mark,” Cleeturss didn’t take his eyes away from his own console. Vinny was generally an optimist, to the point of taking foolish risks that had gotten him in trouble again and again. If he had a bad feeling, Cleeturss did not want to remain in the area any longer than they had to.

  When the Bosphuraq battlecruiser jumped away, after having broken the Jeraptha star carrier and destroying all the Ruhar ships except for one unimportant old training cruiser that jumped away, it had left a nasty surprise for any Jeraptha ships searching for the lost Deal Me In. The battlecruiser dropped off eleven ship-killer missiles, keyed to react only to Jeraptha or equivalent-technology ships. The missiles had been instructed to ignore any Ruhar ships jumping into the battlespace, as those ships could not reach a habitable planet from that location and were already as good as dead anyway.

  After their mother ship jumped away, the missiles spread out in a wide pattern to cover the area, then went silent and activated their tightly-wrapped stealth fields. The missiles noted when the Ruhar training cruiser jumped back in, and they did not drop stealth or attack or react in any way, even when they observed the old cruiser attaching itself to a docking platform on what used to be the aft end of the star carrier.

  The tiny brains of the missiles were smart, and each missile silently fretted while watching passively as the enemy worked on what remained of the star carrier. The enemy was clearly doing something to get the star carrier’s jump drive functioning again, and each missile agonized about whether the Jeraptha ship being restored to even limited flight capability should authorize the missiles to attack. If they could have conferred with each other, they might have decided this unprecedented event allowed them to stretch the bounds of their orders, but the missiles had been programmed for strict communications silence.

  After the astonishing event of the broken star carrier jumping safely away from the battlespace, two of the missiles became deranged by their failure to act, and safeguards built into their artificial brains caused those missiles to fry their electronics and hang cold and dead in space, slowly drifting farther from the battlespace.

  The other nine missiles queried their instruction set to determine what they should have done based on their orders, and the missiles decided their instruction sets did not encompass the possibility of a broken star carrier jumping to safety. So, the missiles felt they were free to rewrite their instructions to carry out their overall mission, and they became absolutely determined not to let any type of enemy ship get away ever again, and to hell with their stupid original orders.

  “Getting responses from drones,” Thelmer’s eyes scanned the flood of incoming data. “That’s odd. There is a second set of drones out there.”

  “Ours or Ruhar?” Vinny asked distractedly, concentrating on his own set of sensor data. It was clear a Jeraptha ship had been hit in that area, enough of the debris was unmistakably from a Jeraptha warship and he also detected residual signs of Bosphuraq warheads. Missiles had been flying, Jeraptha, Bosphuraq and Ruhar. What he could not yet understand was the debris with Jeraptha signatures did not have enough mass to be from an entire star carrier, not even an old one like the Deal Me In. Had part of the star carrier been transformed into subatomic particles? Or had the Bosphuraq somehow, for some unknown but disturbing reason, taken away part of the old Deal Me In? Vinny did not like the thought of that.

  “Both,” Cleeturss responded, surprise in his tone. “There is a second, later set of drones from the Deal Me In, and from a Ruhar training cruiser.”

  “You are certain they are from the Deal Me In?””

  “The registration code is unmistakable,” Thelmer let irritation creep into her voice. Did the ship’s owner think she didn’t know her job? “I verified- Missile warning
red! Jump us out of here!”

  Vinny would not have hesitated, except that he had no choice. His antenna nearly pressed the button for a preprogrammed emergency jump, only seeing a red light flashing on his console made him stop. “Damping field!” He shouted.

  The Sure Thing had jumped in just beyond the rough sphere formed by the nine remaining active missiles, so only two missiles had any chance to hit the ship. Fortunately for the Sure Thing, even the closest missile was far enough away that it needed to compromise stealth by engaging its propulsion system to get within effective range of its warhead. Unfortunately for the Sure Thing, the missile that was slightly farther away contained a technology that was possessed only by the Bosphuraq, Maxolhx and Rindhalu. It was a short-duration damping field, powered by detonation of the missile’s warhead. Compared to similar devices owned by the two senior species, the Bosphuraq damping generator was crude, and effective for only a short sphere around the missile, so crude the Maxolhx had not objected too strongly when their clients recently managed to reverse-engineer the technology.

  “Damping effect-from where?” Ammarie screeched, throwing up her hands. She did not see a ship on sensors, and no ship could both maintain stealth and generate a damping field at the same time. No known ship had that capability, a thought which sent an icy chill from the end of her antenna to the toes of her hind legs. Could they be facing a Maxolhx warship? And why was there the distinct signature of a missile warhead detonation at the center of the damping field? “We-” a section of the display caught her eye. “Jump!”

  Vinny looked at his partner. “But we’re caught in-”

  “I know! Jump! Jump now!”

  The Sure Thing jumped. Sort of.

  “What was that?” Vinny hugged a chair with both sets of legs while gripping the sides of the console with both hands, taking even gulps of air to quell his queasy stomach.