Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “I don’t have a Top Ten list of your worst ideas, Sir.”

  “Give me your gut feeling, please.”

  She looked at Reed, then around the bridge. “If this is our last rodeo, I’d rather engage the enemy, and take as many of them out with us as we can. Dying in a blaze of glory in combat, sounds better than dying under the cold clouds of some anonymous planet.”

  There was a chorus of agreeing murmurs around the bridge. Heads were nodding. “Simms,” I replied after a pause to carefully consider my choice of words. “I hear you. The problem is, one option is a certain blaze of glory, the other gives us at least a chance to live so we can fight again. Skippy, can you give me odds of us surviving a jump into that planet?”

  “Sheee-it,” he grunted. “Truthfully, there are too many unknown variables. It’s worth a try anyway. Think about this. If we lose Valkyrie in battle today, the enemy will no longer have to fear the ghost ship. But, even if we die from jumping into the planet, we will have escaped their trap. The Maxolhx won’t know that we’re dead, they will need to continue being on alert for the ghost ship. Probably for years, they will be racing around, chasing down rumors of the ghost ship being seen here or there. Even in death, we can drive the enemy crazy.”

  Simms gave me a reluctant thumbs up. “That makes sense.”

  “You’re Ok with postponing your blaze of glory?” I asked.

  “I’d rather postpone it forever, if you can arrange that.”

  “I’ll do my best. All right, Skippy, we’ll try this crazy scheme. Everyone, let’s think positive thoughts, Ok?”

  Positive thoughts emanated from Valkyrie, unfortunately doing nothing to deflect the shotgun blasts of railgun darts the heavy cruisers were still throwing at us. Having to dodge railgun darts slowed our forward progress, bringing the three leading ships closer with each turn we made. The three ships that had turned around were approaching the effective edge of our damping field, they soon could jump ahead of us. My expectation was those ships would wait until they were comfortably beyond range of our damping field’s effects, they were in no hurry. They had our ghost ship trapped and they knew it. There was no glory in taking foolish risks, plus they probably wanted to savor their inevitable victory.

  “Enemy have launched missiles,” Simms warned. “Twenty-eight missiles are inbound.”

  “ETA?” I asked, searching for that info on the display.

  “They will be here, beginning eleven seconds after we plan to jump.”

  “They’re planning to start shooting energy weapons early then,” I mused. “The missiles will come in under cover of their other weapons.”

  “This is nothing new, Joe,” Skippy tried to keep me focused. “Like you said, the effective range of energy weapons was an estimate.”

  “Right.” Damn. Right then, I really needed to pee. Telling my nervous bladder to be quiet, I tried to imagine our mighty ship, flying through space while the enemy raced to intercept us. “Reed, give us five seconds margin after we hit the thirty-eight second mark. If we haven’t jumped yet, twist Valkyrie’s tail and get us out of here.”

  The six probes we sent out, loaded with microwormholes, reached a position relative to Valkyrie and matched pace with us. “Skippy?” I asked after waiting patiently for three minutes, while the clock counted down to the magic thirty-eight second mark. Finally, as the clock counted off the final minute, I couldn’t wait any longer. “Will this work?”

  “Um, well,” there was no humor in his voice. “The short answer is ‘no’.”

  “Is there a long answer?”

  “That is also ‘no’. Sorry.”

  “What is the problem?” I fumed at him.

  “Like I told you, time is the problem,” he huffed defensively. “The damping field vibrations are moving faster than light, because they are propagating through higher spacetime. The microwormholes are helping, just not enough. They would need to be very close to the transmitting ships, for me to have sufficient lead time so I could retune our own damping field enough to cancel the vibrations. If the probes were that close to the enemy, they would be targeted and destroyed. Already, one of the probes was nearly fried by a maser beam. The enemy sees our probes and wonders what we are doing with them.”

  “Ok,” I admitted. The clock showed less than a minute before we were scheduled to jump. We would miss that deadline. “I got nothing. That’s it, then? We tried?” A good captain would not have let his crew know he was mentally giving up. I was not that captain.

  “I am truly sorry, Joe. Everyone, I am sorry. It was a good idea; I just can’t make it work.”

  “Hey,” I tried to joke around with him, since that might be my last opportunity for it. “We don’t think any less of you. When the Universe asks me for feedback on your performance, I will write ‘magnificent’ on the comment card.”

  “O. M. GEE, Dude!” He shouted so loud, it rang in my ears. “That is freakin’ brilliant.”

  “It was just a lame joke, Skip-”

  “Not the joke, you idiot,” he was the only person I knew who could call someone both ‘brilliant’ and ‘idiot’ in practically the same thought. “What you said is brilliant.”

  “Uh, about the Universe?”

  “Ugh, no. Feedback. You said ‘feedback’.”

  “Wow.” I caught onto his idea, and he was right. It was brilliant. “You can-”

  “I think so. Testing it now. Dude, prepare to be amazed by my utter awesomeness.”

  “Will someone,” Simms demanded. “Please tell me what is going on?”

  “Skippy is,” I guessed but was pretty sure about being right. “Is going to use our damping field generator to send a feedback signal backwards along the enemy fields. Disrupt them at the source, right?”

  “Correct-a-mundo, Joey my boy,” he laughed. “The test worked! The damping field generator aboard the nearest destroyer just temporarily failed. Ha ha! The crew of that ship must be asking ‘WTF just happened’! Um, that is good news and bad news. The good news is, the feedback trick works. The bad news is, it won’t take long for the AIs of the enemy ships to analyze why the destroyer’s field generator blew. Once they know what happened, they can adjust their damping fields to avoid being vulnerable to feedback.”

  “So, we need to do this quick?

  “That is also correct-a-mundo.”

  “Ok,” I ordered, “launch the DeLorean. We need to do this quick, as soon as the enemy sees the DeLorean, they will try to hit it.”

  On the display, another symbol appeared, representing our modified Kristang dropship. It was wrapped in a junkyard collection of parts taken from the Flying Dutchman, before Skippy made our old star carrier a hotrod by pimping it with leftover Legos. The DeLorean was still a kludgy piece of junk and none of us really trusted it. Plus, the damned thing hadn’t been tested yet. “DeLorean is in position,” I needlessly told Skippy what he already knew. “Do we need a countdown?”

  “No. This will happen much too fast for you monkeys to understand.”

  “Great. Can you give me a level of ‘shmaybe’ for your confidence about this?”

  “What? Dude, I have no idea if this will work or not.”

  “Then why-”

  “I can guarantee that one way or the other, it will be Awe-Some!” he sang.

  “Shit.”

  “Joe, I can offer you a few words of comfort, before we leap into the unknown.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Hold my beer.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Skippy was right. It all happened too fast for us to understand. First, the DeLorean blinked out of existence in a ragged flash of light. Before I could ask whether that little ship had jumped or been struck by enemy fire, we jumped. We tried to jump into the crushing atmosphere of a gas giant planet.

  Instead, we jumped into hell.

  It was not possible, even with the magnificence of Skippy, to jump the ship into an area already occupied by the dense atmosphere of a gas giant planet.
For the ship to survive suddenly emerging in that area, we needed to jump into a low-pressure bubble, except there was no low-pressure region in that roiling collection of toxic gasses.

  So, we made a bubble. A temporary one.

  When the DeLorean jumped in, it was torn apart from emerging where a dense cloud of atoms already existed. Plus, two of our nukes detonated at the same time. The resulting explosions pushed the atmospheric gas away in all directions, creating a short-lived bubble of low pressure.

  A very short-lived bubble. We jumped in just before the atmosphere rushed back to fill the vacuum. That was, according to Skippy, the only way for us to survive emerging within that planet’s atmosphere. Maybe he was telling the truth, and maybe he was screwing with us because he wanted to do some cool thing that had never been done before.

  I had to trust him.

  Saying ‘hold my beer’ before he triggered the crazy stunt had me leaning toward ‘screwing with us’, if you want to know.

  So, we jumped our battlecruiser, with its barely functional jump drive, into the center of a nuclear fireball that was buried deep in the crushing atmosphere of a gas giant planet we knew nothing about. What could possibly go wrong?

  Answer: a lot.

  The timing had to be perfect, like, perfect as only Skippy could manage. The detonation of the DeLorean and the plutonium cores of our tactical nukes had pushed everything outward from the center, in a bubble-shaped shockwave. Valkyrie had to emerge in that bubble after the outer edge of the shockwave expanded far enough to fit our ship nose to tail, and before the constant inward pressure of the atmosphere overcame the very brief outward pressure of the explosion. Our jump had to be super accurate in both timing and location. The timing was tricky, because the DeLorean could not jump until the feedback Skippy sent back along the enemy damping fields canceled them out for a brief moment. Then we had to wait until spacetime ripples created by the DeLorean’s own jump cleared the area around Valkyrie, before it was reasonably safe for us to attempt a jump. By that time, Skippy expected the bubble in the gas giant’s atmosphere would already be collapsing.

  Then there was the problem of jumping our massive battlecruiser exactly into that already-shrinking bubble, deep in the gravity well of a large planet. That deep under the surface of the atmosphere, the dense layer of gas above and to all sides of the bubble created their own tug of gravity, so Skippy had to take all those factors into account. Plus he was working with a jump drive that was held together by duct tape and a prayer.

  So, it was a typical Tuesday for the Merry Band of Pirates.

  Have you ever watched an old submarine movie, like Run Silent Run Deep, or Hunt for Red October? When the boat goes deeper, the pressure of water squeezes the hull, and you can hear the thick steel popping and groaning under the load. Those sounds are alarming and scary and expected. Somehow, the submarine crews get used to hearing the metal of their hull being compressed.

  That is not supposed to happen to starships, which are designed to operate in the hard vacuum of space. When we emerged into the still-hot bubble of intense radiation, our shields and armor protected the ship from being fried. There was enough time for me look at the big holographic display and think ‘We did it’, before the atmosphere rushed in to collapse the temporary bubble. That was when the ship’s hull groaned and squealed and protested with screeching and grinding noises, loud enough that I couldn’t hear whatever Skippy was shouting at me or whoever. There was one particularly loud and shuddering SKREEEEE-BANG-BANG that ended with a high-pitched UUUUUUURK like a giant dragging an aircraft carrier across a parking lot. To make the experience even more fun, because Skippy wanted to make sure we got our money’s worth of entertainment, the ship lurched up, spun, and then the bottom dropped out as we began falling.

  I do not recommend that carnival ride, especially after you’ve eaten a couple of deep-fried corndogs with onion rings.

  Then the real trouble hit.

  Skippy’s timing had not been optimal, so we were traveling twenty-one hundred kilometers per hour faster than the clouds around us had been moving as they rotated with the planet. Plus, the clouds were propelled at eight hundred kph straight at us, as a massive storm raced endlessly around the planet. We hit that dense cloud of toxic gas like it was a brick wall, and Skippy had to choose between using reactor power to strengthen the ship’s structural integrity, or feeding that power to the shields. He compromised by strengthening critical parts of the structure, while allowing shields along our flanks to slump inward. That worked for the first second or so, preventing Valkyrie from collapsing like an accordion, until the ship lurched sideways and we went racing into the storm at an angle that caused shields along the port side to flicker and for Valkyrie’s mighty central spine to bend. That spine was not supposed to flex at all. The unexpected torque would have snapped the spine in half, except Skippy counterintuitively cut power to the structural integrity fields that were holding the spine’s composite materials rigid. Without the reinforcement of the fields, the spine absorbed the shock, allowed the energy to rebound out to the braces that connected the spine to the outer frames, and saved the ship from being torn apart. Many of those braces fractured but there were plenty of them to take up the slack, and pumping extra power into the structural integrity fields of the braces kept them stable enough. In some cases, the fields surrounded shattered braces, with the actual material providing no help at all.

  The momentum of Valkyrie’s massive bulk kept us plowing through the roiling clouds long enough for the armor plating on the nose to glow cherry red from friction, then we came to a stop relative to the cold and dense gasses around us.

  That’s when we dropped toward the planet’s solid inner core.

  “Ahhhh!” I yelped as my command chair fell away from me, the straps digging into the tops of my thighs. You know what was really scary? Seeing a new indicator labelled ‘Rate of Descent’ on the main display. And seeing the numbers scroll rapidly upward. And being barely able to read the numbers because the ship was bouncing and vibrating so badly. Yeah, all that was scary.

  You know what was the scariest part?

  The new display was misspelled ‘Rate of Decent’, not ‘Descent’. Skippy had added that indicator so quickly, he absent-mindedly forgot to check the spelling.

  Why?

  Because freakin’ starships are not supposed to descend, that’s why!

  They are supposed to spend their lives in the nice, safe hard vacuum of space.

  “We’re falling!” I gave the breaking news flash to the crew, in case anyone had not noticed. “Reed! Stand the ship on her tail and go to full thrust!”

  “I’m trying,” she shouted back, or something like that. It was difficult to hear her, both because of all the other noise and because my brain was being rattled in my skull.

  The ship’s nose came up as Reed fired thrusters to get Valkyrie properly oriented. It worked for a moment, the tail was swinging slowly down. Then something new went wrong or some vital component failed and the nose flipped downward in a sickening lurch that had me fighting not to blow chunks all over the bridge.

  “Got it! I got it!” Reed assured the crew as Valkyrie pointed directly nose down and accelerated toward depths that would crush the hull like an eggshell. Gradually, she applied reverse thrust, and our fatal descent slowed. That was a great feature of reactionless engines, they could apply thrust backward or forward. Technically, they could also apply thrust to the side, although that only made the ship’s ass end spin in the opposite direction. Except when vectoring power for a tighter turn, thrust was supposed to be aligned with Valkyrie’s center of gravity.

  According to the display, we fell twelve and a half kilometers before Reed got the ship hanging by her tail, dangling in the clouds with no visible means of support.

  “Thank God,” I said with a shudder. Remember those old submarine movies I mentioned? To that list, add Ice Station Zebra. I felt like telling Fireball Reed to ‘maintain revolutions’
! Instead, I said something that made more sense in our situation. “Outstanding work, pilot. Can you pull us up and out of this by flying ass-first?”

  She shook her head without turning toward me. “Colonel, I don’t even know how long I can hold us at this depth. The engines are overheating.”

  Shit. A glance at the display showed engine temperature status as red lights everywhere. “Skippy!”

  “Doing the best I can, Joe,” he snapped. “You think this is easy?”

  “If it was easy, we wouldn’t need the magnificence of you. Do something!”

  “Working on it. Reed, ease off the throttle by nineteen percent,” Skippy directed.

  “Reduce the power?” I demanded as I waved for Reed to ignore Skippy’s instructions.

  “Trust me on this, Joe,” he pleaded. “The engines are on the verge of burning out. No time to explain.”

  I had to trust the beer can.

  I had to. Trust. A. Beer. Can.

  How had my life gone so wrong?

  Gritting my teeth and fighting against common sense and instincts, I gave the order. “Reduce thrust by nineteen percent.”

  And I immediately regretted not listening to my instincts, as the bottom fell out. Valkyrie sagged downward, building up speed as we fell toward crush depth.

  At first, I thought Reed had obeyed her own instincts rather than my orders, because our sickening fall slowed. Gradually at first, then with noticeably greater authority, our fall was arrested. “What is happening?” I demanded, hoping Skippy had done something awesome like boosting the efficiency of the engines.

  “We’re gaining positive buoyancy, Joe,” he explained.

  “Uh, we’re what?”

  “Let me break this down Barney-style for you, knucklehead,” he said peevishly. “I am expanding the shields outward, so that the atmosphere displaced is becoming equal to Valkyrie’s mass. We are floating, Joe.”

  “Floating,” I repeated stupidly. “Ok, that, that’s great! How high can we go?”