Beyond the Shroud of the Universe (25 page)

“I thought it would be good to do a little planning before we jump into the HD 69830 system,” Captain Sheppard said, “especially since Lieutenant Commander Hobbs has now returned to a duty status again. Ops?”

“Yes sir,” the operations officer, Commander Dan Dacy, said. “We are about two hours from the jump into the Aesir’s home system. Nightsong made the jump about 10 hours ago, so he will have half a day’s head start on whatever he intends to do there. All of our weapons systems are operational.”

“Are we expecting to jump into a combat situation?” Calvin asked. “Have we heard anything from the Aesir?”

“No, we haven’t,” Captain Sheppard replied, “and that has me a little worried. I know the Aesir aren’t the galaxy’s biggest communicators, but I kind of expected to see at least a ship or two of theirs in transit. So far, however, nothing.”

“So, for all we know,” Calvin said, “the Jotunn and their new allies, whoever they are, may already have taken the Aesir’s home world of Golirion.”

“That is correct,” Commander Dacy said.

“That would make following Nightsong…dangerous…if the Jotunn and their allies are in the system,” Calvin said, “especially if he has worked out some sort of alliance with them.”

“Yes it would,” Captain Sheppard agreed. “If any of the Jotunn ships are in the system, they will probably outclass us, making combat with them problematic, especially if they can jump between universes.”

“I wonder…” Calvin started, before trailing off.

“You wonder what?” Captain Sheppard asked.

“Well, sir, I’m wondering if the Jotunn’s allies have shared the secret of their jump modules with them. When we last saw the Jotunn, they didn’t do any jumping between universes; they just let their allies do all the work for them. If the Jotunn had the capability to jump, they wouldn’t have gone through everything they have. They would have just gone to Golirion and blown it up, or captured it or whatever they intend to do.”

“That makes sense,” Captain Sheppard said, “but I wouldn’t want to bet our safety on it. If they do have them, and we get too close to one of their monster spaceships, we will be destroyed. No ifs, ands or buts. We’ll be dead.”

“Yes sir, I understand that,” Calvin replied, “but let’s look at it from the Jotunn’s ally’s perspective. The giants are enormous and have enormous spaceships with correspondingly large weapons. The ally’s ships, however, seem to be more our size, if not smaller.” He looked at Captain Sheppard and raised an eyebrow. “Would
you
want to give the Jotunn the ability to come into
your
universe if they were your allies, or would you rather keep them in their own universe where they couldn’t get at you?”

“I’d rather keep them at an arm’s length.”

“Yeah, I would too. I can’t think of anything the Jotunn have that they could use as leverage to make their ally give them the secret, either. If the ally didn’t like what the Jotunn were doing, they could always just run back to their own universe where the Jotunn couldn’t get them.” He shrugged. “They could always attack them, too, like they did the Aesir. It would take longer to destroy a Jotunn ship than an Aesir ship, but if you were determined enough, you could certainly do it.”

“But what if the Jotunn were the ones that developed the jump modules and gave them to their allies?” Commander Dacy asked.

“If the Jotunn had developed them, wouldn’t they have gone straight at the Aesir like we already discussed?”

“Yeah, I guess they would have,” the operations officer admitted.

“So, the ally has the jump module and meets up with the Jotunn somehow,” Captain Sheppard said. “They decide to work together for some reason and strike up an alliance. Then, the Jotunn convince the ally to help them with the Aesir, their long-time enemies. The ally probably thinks, ‘sure, that will be easy,’ especially after the first combat or two with the Aesir go their way. They think it will be easy for them to help the Jotunn, and they’ll get whatever reward the Jotunn have promised them.”

“Then we show up and destroy their ship,” Calvin said.

“Yes, and that may have called for a re-evaluation of their agreement. All of a sudden, the ally is taking losses. Their leaders may not have liked that. If nothing else, they probably don’t like
us
. And, if we show up again in the
Gulf
, they might go out of their way to destroy us. They certainly didn’t seem to have a problem destroying the Aesir ships or attacking us with no warning.”

“Whatever code they fight by,” Lieutenant O’Leary said, “it ain’t chivalry.”

“No, it’s not,” Calvin said. “So, if the ally is in the next system and they see us, we might not have any choice
but
combat.”

“That certainly sounds like we’re heading toward a worst case scenario,” Captain Sheppard said.

“I think the worst case scenario would be a mixed force of Jotunn and their ally’s ships,” Calvin said. “If the Jotunn don’t have jump modules, like we suspect, we could use their ally’s maneuvers against them and jump back and forth between universes while we attack. It would take a while to destroy a Jotunn vessel, but we could do it.” He shook his head. “If there are some of the ally’s ships there, though, they’ll be able to jump back and forth with us. I’m not sure how such a fight would end up, but it would make fighting the Jotunn at the same time a lot more complicated.”

“We would have to fight the ally’s ships first,” Captain Sheppard said, visualizing the fight in his head. “Maybe even fight them in their own universe where the Jotunn couldn’t get at us.”

“I think we’d probably want to,” Calvin agreed; “the problem would be making them stay in a single universe to fight, without jumping back and forth. We’d be handicapped if we had to stay in one universe and they didn’t. We’d have to chase them down where we could use our lasers; they’d never let any of our missiles hit them.”

“I had an idea on that,” mumbled a voice from the end of the table.

“What?” Captain Sheppard asked. “Who said that?”

“I did, sir,” Lieutenant Bradford said. “I’ve been giving a lot of thought to fighting the ally’s ships, and I have an idea or two on how we might do it better.”

“By all means, Lieutenant, tell us what you’ve got.”

“The only reason our missiles are ineffective against the ally’s ships is that they jump to the other universe to avoid them, right?” Lieutenant Bradford asked. The CO nodded, so the lieutenant continued, “So, we just need to keep our missiles from flying past them. We need the missiles to wait in place for them and blow up when they get back.”

“Okay, how do we do that?” Commander Dacy asked. “The missiles use all of their fuel accelerating to attack speed. How are you going to stop them when they don’t have any fuel remaining?”

“We can’t,” Lieutenant Bradford acknowledged.

“I don’t see how that’s helping, then,” the operations officer said in exasperation.

“We can’t stop the missiles,” Lieutenant Bradford said, “but we don’t need to.” He turned back to the CO. “All we need to do is either stop the warhead or jump the missile, like they do. For the first option, if we can make some sort of ejection system for the warhead that slows it down significantly, that might work, especially if the missile was chasing the ship from behind and the closing velocity was less. For the second, I was wondering if we could make a scaled down version of the jump module and attach it to some of our missiles. I don’t know if the ally has a different type of jump module on their missiles that allow them to jump back and forth, but if we could design something like that, we could really be effective against them. That way, when their ships jump back and forth, our missiles can jump back and forth too, and they can track them no matter where they go.”

“That would certainly be helpful,” the CO said with a nod.

“It would be really cool if I could get that to work,” Lieutenant Bradford said. “Since they don’t appear to have shields, our missiles would do even more damage than normal to them.”

“That’s great,” the
Vella Gulf’s
executive officer, Commander Russ Clayton, said, “and I hope you figure it out. The problem is going to be staying alive. Have you come up with anything to defend against the torpedoes they’re shooting at us?”

“It’s a very similar problem,” Lieutenant Bradford said. “We want to keep our missiles from flying through the ally’s torpedoes when they jump to the other universe. We either need an ejection system, like I discussed earlier, or maybe some new programming that loops our anti-missile missiles in from behind the torpedoes where the velocity differential won’t be as great. Both of these options have the potential for success.”

“One question,” Captain Sheppard said.

“Yes sir?” Lieutenant Bradford asked.

“What are you doing sitting here talking about it when you should be on a laptop or at a terminal somewhere, making it work?”

“Oh! You want me to leave and work on these ideas?”

Captain Sheppard turned to his XO. “XO, why is he still here?”

“I’m leaving, sir!” Lieutenant Bradford said. He jumped up sprinted out of the room.

“I had another idea,” Calvin said.

“You did?” the CO asked.

“Yes sir,” Calvin said with a smile. “Being laid up gives you a lot of time to think. My thought was that, at least until Lieutenant Bradford works out something better, one stopgap method for fighting the ally would be to change the way
we
do business.”

“What do you mean?” the operations officer asked.

“Normally, we fire our missiles in a salvo, which helps us defeat our traditional adversaries’ defenses. In this case, though, it makes it easier for our new enemy to avoid them. If we fire our missiles sequentially, they won’t be able to jump back and forth as quickly. They will have to stay out of the universe longer…which we can use to our advantage.”

“What do you mean?” the operations officer asked.

“One idea would be to set up a coordinated strike between the
Gulf
and the squadron,” Calvin said. “How about this? The
Gulf
ripple fires some missiles while the fighters are fairly close to the enemy ship. When the enemy jumps out of our universe, the fighters fire their missiles. Hopefully, the enemy ship jumps back in as the fighters’ missiles arrive, and it doesn’t have a chance to avoid them.” He sat back with a smile. “Boom.”

“I like that,” the CO said. “Ops, have your folks work with the squadron planners and develop some tactics for a coordinated strike. Until we have something better, it’s at least worth a try.”

“Yes sir,” Commander Dacy said. “We’ll put that together when we’re done here.”

Captain Sheppard nodded. “Good. Hopefully, we won’t need it, but if they’re in the next system, I want to have something new to try against them.” He paused, then asked the operations officer, “What are your thoughts on system entry?”

“If I may, sir,” Calvin interrupted, “I also had some thoughts on that…”

“Ahead dead slow,” Captain Sheppard ordered.

“Ahead dead slow, aye,” the helmsman repeated in a muted voice.

The atmosphere on the bridge was tenser than any time Captain Sheppard could remember; the crew was even more nervous than when the ship had gone behind the enemy lines against the Drakuls. It was the unknown, he thought; the Drakuls were evil and the odds were high, but at least they knew what they were getting into then. Here, there were so many things that could go wrong…it was even worse because they had stopped to mount the ship’s stealth modules and were now over a full day behind Nightsong. Although necessary for their deception plan, Captain Sheppard begrudged every minute spent mounting the equipment; it gave Nightsong additional time to set his plans in motion.

“Give me a systems check,” Captain Sheppard said.

“Engines ahead dead slow,” the helmsman said. His voice was so tight the CO could barely hear him. “Stargate entry in two minutes.”

“General Quarters set,” the duty engineer said. “Stealth modules operational and active.”

Captain Sheppard knew the stealth modules would fail when they made the jump through the stargate; they always did. Just about anything electronic was disrupted for a brief period traveling through the portal; the stealth modules would have to be re-engaged on the other side. The ship would be visible to anyone watching the stargate for a brief period; there was nothing they could do. Their only hope was to enter the system as slowly as possible, which minimized the electromagnetic pulse a stargate emitted when a ship transited. The faster the ship was going, the bigger the pulse. By going dead slow, he hoped their transition into the next system wouldn’t be noticed.

It was a risky plan. If they were noticed, they would be going too slowly to maneuver effectively. They would be sitting ducks. And he absolutely
hated
the term ‘dead’ slow.

“All defensive missile systems and lasers not covered by the stealth modules are manned and ready,” the DSO reported. Since the stealth modules blocked the weapons’ ports, the CO knew they would have to forego half their offensive and defensive weapons systems. Not only would they be sitting ducks; they would be nearly unarmed sitting ducks.

“All offensive missile systems and grasers not covered by the stealth modules are manned and ready,” the OSO added.

“Fighters manned and ready,” Lieutenant Commander Sarah ‘Lights’ Brighton said.

“All communications systems in standby,” the communications officer said. The CO didn’t want anything transmitting upon entry that would give them away…but he wanted the ability to try to talk his way out of trouble quickly if it was needed.

“All sensor systems in standby,” Steropes added from the sensor station.

“Making the jump,” the helmsman mumbled a few seconds later…