Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  While our cloud of missiles flew onward, we had a movie night in the galley. Before the movie, we were showing and mostly laughing at photos people took during our time on Gingerbread. Our time there now seemed to be an idyllic year-long vacation in our rose-colored nostalgia glasses, because we had escaped from the Roach Motel and were hopefully going home soon. Everything was going great until Skippy began inserting random images that were definitely not from Gingerbread.

  Like the photo from Major Simms’ military ID card.

  “No! Don’t!” Simms implored me but the image was already there on the screen. “It’s a horrible photo of-Oh, crap.”

  It was a bad picture of her, a terrible picture, but come on, nobody likes the way they look on a driver’s license or ID card. It looked like the photo was taken with a fisheye lens, it made Simms’ face look too big and round and her forehead too high. I tried to keep a straight face, unfortunately, Lauren Poole in the back of the galley slapped the table, unable to control herself. “You look like a potato with a hairpiece.”

  OMG I never laughed so hard in my life, and Gunny Adams had trouble catching her breath. Simms’ face turned bright red before she also joined in the laughter. People had tears running down their cheeks and one of the British team fell off his chair. When I was able to talk again, I tried to make up for the insult to our logistics officer. Into my zPhone, I whispered “Skippy, pull up the photo from my driver’s license.”

  Damn, that picture was awful. I had to sneeze just as the grumpy witch at the DMV took the photo, and she refused to give me a do-over. So my mouth is gaping open, my nose is wrinkled and my eyes are half-closed. I hated that stupid photo that followed me around the world and now to the stars. Although, this made me smile while the crowd had a good laugh at my expense, seeing the license photo reminded me that my Maine driver’s license had expired by now. If we ever got back to Earth, I would need to renew my license and get a new photo! That would be my chance to-Oh, crap, that wasn’t going to work. No matter how careful I was to not look like an idiot when the DMV took my photo, a certain asshole beer can would hack into the system and alter the image. I’d be lucky if I didn’t look like a brain-damaged chimpanzee.

  “Hey, Your Magnificence, any luck yet?” I asked while stifling a yawn. It was going to be a long night, and a long couple days, even if we did get super lucky.

  “What? No, you moron, the first six microwormholes just got into position. I haven’t even had time to adjust the sensors for local background solar particle density and radiation levels.”

  “Ok, sorry, Skip, you know us monkeys can get-”

  “Although, hmm, something out there is leaking radioactive plasma. Yup! Bingo! We have a Kristang ship, it passed through recently, based on decay of the plasma. Unfortunately, the microwormhole that detected the particle trail flew through the trail side to side, so I can’t use that microwormhole to track the ship. Oh, well, I can use it to passively scan for medium-range sensor data, and to coordinate the whole squadron. In fact, hmm, we are in a bit of luck. The particle density of the trail the ship is leaving behind is so thick, I can use a pair of missiles to track it, without releasing their microwormhole kernels from containment. Bonus, dude.”

  What Skippy meant was when microwormholes were being carried by missiles at high acceleration, that wormhole was only a kernel, a seed of the wormhole Skippy would open. The near end was in one of our cargo bays, with the far end encased in a magnetic force field inside the missile’s forward shroud. So long as that magnetic field held the kernel within its boundaries, the missile could maneuver almost at combat acceleration, and the microwormhole would remain intact and ready for use. But to activate the microwormhole, it needed to be released from containment, expelled from the missile’s shroud, and expanded. At that point, the missile was discarded and the microwormhole could be moved only very slowly and gently. Skippy could use the wormhole as a real-time sensor platform, with no annoyingly slow speed-of-light lag back to the ship. He could send signals though the tiny wormholes, and as we demonstrated in the skies above Newark, we could shoot a maser beam through it, although transmitting that much power through the spacetime wrinkle caused the wormhole to collapse.

  Our missiles were mostly Thuranin gear, with a few from the Jeraptha and even three from the wreckage of a Rindhalu starship. If you got excited about us getting access to Rindhalu tech, then prepare to be bitterly disappointed, because those three spider missiles were over eight hundred thousand years old, and were obsolete junk even compared to the obsolete Thuranin weapons we recovered from the Roach Motel junkyard. Anyway, it didn’t matter much what type of missile we used, because all we needed were their propulsion modules and stealth fields. The motors were pretty much original in most cases, with Skippy performing only minor tweaks, but he seriously upgraded their stealth capability so they were ready for the delicate task they needed to perform.

  “The ship is where you expected it to be?” I was puzzled while watching the main bridge display. The pair of missiles Skippy had sent weaving back and forth to follow the particle trail left by the unseen ship, were now headed away from the cluster of meteors where we thought the ship would be hiding. He had another pair of missiles flying in the opposite direction, flying a wider pattern. The worst part was, the Flying Dutchman was close to the meteor cluster, and out of position to intercept the enemy ship.

  “Uh, no,” the beer can admitted. “That is odd, but not entirely outside the scope of my expectations.”

  “What?” I jabbed a finger at the display. “The particle trail is nowhere close to that meteor shower, and those missiles are getting farther away every second.”

  “Yes, Joe, duh. The particle trail goes in two directions, I have the first pair of missiles flying toward where the trail is denser and the decay of radioactive elements indicates the particles were expelled from the ship more recently. That end of the trail leads to the ship. The other end tells me where the ship flew in the past, and by data from the other two missiles, I know the ship’s course came within twenty thousand kilometers of the meteor shower. The ship would have avoided the cluster of meteors because its passage through such a dense cloud of rocks would have compromised the ship’s stealth.”

  “Oh, crap,” I groaned as Chang expressed the same sentiment in the CIC. “The Keepers have already been deployed in aeroshells? Damn it, no way can we capture them now, they’ll be spread out all over the freakin’ sky!”

  “Don’t be so hasty, Joe,” Skippy’s voice was a soothing tone he rarely used. “Yes, it does not make sense for the Kristang to fly close to the meteor cluster more than once, but there are other possibilities to consider. First, there may be more than one enemy ship involved.”

  “What? You told us-”

  “I told you what the data indicated. If that data was incomplete, or the Kristang changed their plans, I would not know about that, would I?” He huffed, annoyed at me. “This is supposed to be a secret operation by the Kristang, it’s not like I was able to get details on their evening news feed, you know?”

  “Sorry, Skippy.”

  “Joe, the proper time to be sorry is when you get out of bed in the morning and realize you are still an ignorant monkey, not after you say something stupid to piss me off. Nonetheless, as I am humbly generous with my awesomeness, your apology is accepted. Getting back to the subject after you so rudely interrupted me, it is possible the ship whose trail I detected is flying recon, to scout ahead for a ship carrying the Keepers. I have other missiles scanning for a second ship now. However, I think it is much more likely there is only a single ship involved, and that it sent out one or more dropships as it approached the meteor cluster. That scenario makes much more sense than the idea of the Kristang devoting more than one ship to this operation. Having more ships involved increases the expense, and increases the odds of the Ruhar detecting the Kristang presence in the Paradise system. Also, properly deploying the aeroshells requires the Keepers to already be insi
de the meteor cluster when they are sent out, and as I stated, maneuvering a starship inside such a high-density cluster of rocks is tricky. Using dropships makes much more sense.”

  “Ok,” I exchanged a thumbs up with Chang. “I wish you had told us that before, but, whatever. Can you scan the meteor cluster for dropships?”

  “Doing that now, Joe. Please understand that is a large area generously sprinkled with dust and rocks and other crap, so it is not easy to find one or two stealthed dropships in there. Kristang dropships do not use fusion reactors for power, so there is not a nice trail of elements made radioactive by high-energy neutron activation, such as the molten lithium the Kristang typically use as a coolant medium on their smaller ships.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. That’s what I was going to say, or, you know, some other nerdy shit like that.”

  “Nerdy? Joe, I, ugh. Oof, I can’t even-Oh, forget it. You should think of reactor-powered starships as leaving a trail of sparkly magic fairy dust behind them.”

  Since my understanding of fusion power was sadly lacking, I dropped the subject. “If it is so superduper difficult, how do you plan to find any dropships in there?”

  “Working on it, Joe, working on it. You could help tremendously by shutting your pie hole for a moment and let the adults handle this. The first pair of missiles is now picking up trace amounts of samarium cobalt that has been embrittled by heavy neutron bombardment, which makes me certain of two things. First, samarium cobalt is used in secondary magnetic plasma containment systems aboard older Kristang ships, so the particle trail is absolutely from a small lizard warship such as a frigate or destroyer. Any larger capital ship would have had its containment system overhauled and upgraded by now. Second, the missiles are getting close enough to the target ship that I can now release one of the microwormholes for scanning. I’m going to be busy, so kindly shut up for a minute.”

  When Skippy said ‘close’ and then ‘for a minute’, I expected he would nail the location of the enemy ship quickly, like within ten minutes. Instead, it took forty seven minutes, during which time I sat quietly but growing more stressed with every second that passed. Finally, when I was about to go crazy from waiting and doing nothing, the beer can spoke. “Got it! That ship is an old Morta-class destroyer, when I say old I mean the last Morta-class left the shipyard over five hundred years ago. Damn, no wonder it is leaving a trail of radioactive particles behind like breadcrumbs. Wait, wait, give me another moment and I will have that ship positively identified. Bingo! It is the ‘Final Crushing Blow to the Enemy’s Spirit’. We can probably call it the ‘Spirit’ for short.”

  “Great.”

  “You said ‘great’ but your tone was not as thrilled as it should be, Joe,” Skippy sniffed, no doubt miffed that I missed the opportunity to once again praise his magnificent awesomeness.

  “I would be more thrilled if we could simply put a missile up that ship’s ass and then jump out of here. Without knowing if the Keepers are still aboard, we can’t take any action against that ship, damn it!”

  “It is a frustrating dilemma for sure, Joe.”

  “Do you have any suggestions? Even if we are able to locate dropships in that meteor cloud, we can’t hit them either until we know whether they have deployed the Keepers in aeroshells. Crap, this is getting way too complicated. I would love to notify the Ruhar fleet and let them handle the problem, but we can’t give away the secret that humans are flying around in a pirate starship.”

  “I do have an idea, Joe. Sit back, relax, and behold the awesomeness! Or, go get some popcorn or coffee or something, it will be a while before we get to the awesomeness part.”

  ‘A while’ in Skippy’s estimate meant more than five freakin’ hours in meatsack time. Ok, sure, what he was doing was a very delicate operation and we couldn’t rush it without revealing our presence and spooking the Spirit into jumping away. I knew that, I understood that, I also hated it.

  The awesome thing he did required two microwormholes. The first one, released from its carrier missile, provided sensor data to Skippy so he could guide the other missile. He knew roughly where the target ship was, but ‘roughly’ was a sphere seventy thousand kilometers in diameter and that was way too imprecise for his purpose. He was able to gently steer the microwormhole so the search area was between him and the star, which allowed him a good view of the light-bending effect of the enemy stealth field. Once he saw the characteristic ripple distortion of a poor-quality Kristang stealth field, he was able to map the field and estimate its coverage and frequency. The field had several weak points, he programmed the missile to slowly and carefully approach the enemy, tuning the missile’s stealth field to match that generated by the Spirit. It slid inside the field and would have become lost to us, except of course Skippy had the kernel of a microwormhole tucked away under that missile’s shroud, so he still had sensor coverage and perfect control of the missile. The beer can expertly tucked our missile between two engine nozzles, where the Kristang’s already crappy proximity sensors were especially blind.

  Then he proceeded with the actual awesome part. Yes, sneaking a missile up close enough to touch an unsuspecting warship would be considered super bodaciously awesome by anyone else, but by the standards of Skippy the Once-Again-And-Even-More-So-Magnificent, doing that was not even a decent magic trick. No, he had something truly special planned.

  The Spirit had been transported from Camp Alpha by a Bosphuraq star carrier, and those birdbrains do not possess nanovirus technology like the Thuranin. Skippy thought the Bosphuraq did not even know about the nanovirus used by their rivals, which was a significant advantage for the little green pinheads. The target ship was infected by nanovirus, but those tiny machines were so old and so degraded, most of them had self-destructed to avoid their decayed components being detected. No way could even Skippy take over the destroyer using a nanovirus, and because the Kristang isolate their control systems to prevent a hostile higher-tech species from remotely seizing control, our beer can was also not able to completely infiltrate the Spirit’s computers. He was able to project a local field through the microwormhole, right against the ship’s hull, and disable internal sensors in that small area.

  He improvised. Our Thuranin missiles came equipped with a handy-dandy self-repair kit of insect-like bots and a tightly-packed canister of nanomachines. The bots and nano were intended to restore mildly damaged missiles to operation, or to keep missiles combat-ready when they were deployed away from their mother ship for long periods on blockade duty or other detached assignments. Skippy instructed the bots to activate, leave their storage bins and each bot took a supply of nanomachines with them as they leapt across the gap between missile and ship’s hull.

  Not even Skippy’s magnificence could allow the squadron of bots to simply use an airlock to gain access to the interior of the destroyer, because the Kristang set up their airlocks to at least partly require manual operation. These bots were tiny, like mosquitos, even working together they lacked the size and strength to turn a heavy wheel to crank open an airlock. No problem. Skippy sent the bots scurrying along the hull to a vulnerability the lizards hadn’t even considered. It was a small thermal exhaust port, and the bots happily crawled along down the port toward the main reactor. A third of the way down, they stopped to remove a valve and, presto! They were inside. Because that valve had to operate regularly whenever the reactor was pumping out heat, the bots reinstalled the valve behind them under Skippy’s direction.

  Skippy later told me all the amazing things he had his army of bots do, but a lot of it was blah, blah, blah, nerdy tech-talk that had my brain spinning and my eyes glazing over. Oh crap. Please do NOT tell Skippy I said that, he thought I was listening intently the whole time, while really I was dreaming of making a sandwich. Hey, I had been on duty in the command chair for a long time and I was hungry. Besides, I am talking about a supremely delicious sandwich. Thick-sliced ham, with fresh turkey. Fresh, real turkey, not a thin, suspiciously round disc
of processed ‘turkey food product’ whatever the hell that is. A slice of cheddar cheese, not too sharp but not so bland it gets lost, you know? You add a bit of horseradish between slices of ham, some honey mustard or, ooh! Even better, maple-mustard on the turkey, with sweet roasted peppers—

  Ok, fine. Back to the subject. Where was I? Now I’m really hungry. I’ll bet you’re hungry now too. Anyway, Skippy’s drafted army of bots creepily crawled throughout that ship, physically plugging into one local system after another. I wish he had been able to do that, way back when we boarded and seized the frigate Heavenly Flower of Glorious Victory near Paradise, because our boarding action back then had been a bloody, desperate, chaotic mess. Unfortunately, we had to take the Flower quickly that day. That frigate only had a short time to jump in, pick up our stolen Ruhar Dodo dropship and jump away, because a whole lot of Ruhar ships were burning to intercept the Flower. With the Spirit lazily drifting along in stealth and blissful ignorance, Skippy was able to slowly and painstakingly work his way into every system aboard the ship, until he had absolute control of every electronic device within the hull.

  “Aaaaand, done!” He announced with more weariness than glee. “Damn, that was tedious. Tee-DEE-ous! My bots had to keep ducking out of the way to stay hidden from Kristang maintenance and security bots. Uh, wow. Seven hours went by since those bots left the missile? Whoooo, I am tired. Skippy needs a nap. I’ll set an alarm to wake myself. Ohhhhh,” he yawned, “that was a good nap.”