SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (21 page)

“Zero. That’s not a ’meh’ zero, it is zee-roh, Joe. By
my estimate, we have at most one minute before the first Thuranin ship jumps in
and detects us."

The display told me the jump engines now had barely a
thirty percent charge. "Fine, great. Explain your pla-"

"Enemy ship jumped in!" Chang shouted. An
angry triangle symbol was now on the display, far enough away that we should be
able to dodge most of its particle beam shots, too close for comfort.

"We jump away now, Skippy?" I asked
anxiously. Maybe I should have left him in the elevator and taken the
Flower
out myself as a decoy.

"No, Joe, jumping away now would be the smart
thing to do. The smart thing to do has a zero chance of success, as I
explained. Trust me, you will be awed by my stupidity."

We started Skippy's stupid plan with waiting another
thirty five seconds, until three of the Thuranin destroyers jumped in, locked
onto us with their sensor fields, and began firing missiles and particle beams.
We waited, even though we could have managed a short jump away, with a thirty
percent jump engine charge. We almost cut it too close, particle beams knocked
back our shields, and a missile got so close that fragments of its warhead hit
one of our remaining functional reactors, and that reactor became less
functional. Like, not at all.

When we finally did jump away, the word 'jump' was
accurate but 'away' was not. A key stupidity in Skippy's stupid plan was
jumping toward, not away from the star. By toward, I mean we jumped in close.
Close enough that, if I could live on a star, I could see my house. Close
enough that, deep as we now were in the star's gravity well, jumping back out
would be difficult, even for a ship with a full charge, a healthy set of coils,
and a calibrated jump system. We didn't have any of those three critical
assets. Jumping in close to the star, close enough that we needed our shields
just to keep the ship from being fried, wasn't stupid enough for Skippy. As
soon as we emerged from the jump point, we set course straight for the star and
kicked the ship's tail, accelerated at maximum thrust, deeper into the gravity
well. This was Skippy's hold-my-beer-watch-this moment.

The whole maneuver was sufficiently stupid that when
the Thuranin destroyers jumped in behind us, they hesitated to follow us in.
For a minute, they spread out and tried to hit us from long distance. There was
so much interference from the star's hellish magnetic field that their own
networked sensor fields couldn't target us. One of the little green men must
have made a decision after their particle beams all missed, and their missiles
went off course, because the destroyers turned at the same time and burned hard
in after us.

Here's the thing; star carriers can jump long
distances, and jump again and again. That makes star carriers seem fast. They
are not fast. What a star carrier can do is keep going, long after other ships
have run out of charge or burned out their jump drive coils. In normal space, a
star carrier handles like a big cruise ship, and the destroyers were like
speedboats. A cruise ship can cross an ocean and leave any speedboats far
behind after a while; over any short distance, a speedboat will run rings
around a cruise ship. What this means is those destroyers gained on us quickly.
Very quickly. To see how quickly they were closing the distance, I didn't need
to look at the rapidly decreasing 'Range to Target' section of the main bridge
display, I only needed to watch the triangle symbols of those five warships.
Those triangles were swiftly moving across the display as I watched. In front
of us on the display was the star, so close that the surface of the star was a
straight line, not a curve at all. "Uh, Skippy, those ships are going to
be on top of us in," now I did check the Estimated Time to Closure section
of the display, "seven minutes. We can't jump away this close to a star,
and those destroyers are going to pound us to dust. If this is the stupid part
of your plan, I don't want to see any more."

"Joe, I promise, you ain't see stupid yet. Watch
this."

In front of us on the display, the surface of the star
was no longer a straight line, it had a distinct indent to the surface, like an
invisible knife was pushing into it. The dent widened and grew deeper, so deep
the display had to zoom outward. Holy shit, he was making a giant hole in the
star. "I'm distorting spacetime," Skippy explained, "when I
release the effect, that hole in the star is going to collapse and cause a
massive solar flare. Like, a historic, holy-shit size solar flare. One way or
the other, this will be majorly interesting."

"A solar flare that will incinerate the
Dutchman
?"
The Thuranin destroyer squadron had seen the danger, they had turned around and
were now burning at maximum thrust to get away from the star.

"Mmm, shmaybe. The really stupid part starts now.
No one has ever tried this before, so hang on."

Skippy released the spacetime distortion of the star.
On the display, the surface of the star rippled as it filled in the gap, then
the surface erupted outward. Toward us. Fast.

"Skippy!" I shouted. The ship rocked.

"The star is collapsing; those are gravity waves
hitting us at lightspeed. Jump option Zulu!" Skippy shouted back.
"Now!"

How the hell were we supposed to jump so deep in a
gravity well? The display showed the front edge of the enormous solar flare had
almost engulfed us. There was no time to argue. "Pilot! Engage jump option
Zulu," I ordered in as calm a voice as I could manage. If this didn't
work, at least we wouldn't need nukes to vaporize any trace of evidence that
humans were roaming the galaxy.

In front of me, Desai pressed the button to initiate
the selected jump. Whatever Skippy was doing, the jump drive didn't like it,
the whole ship flickered in and out of existence in my vision and shook
violently. Displays went dark and some exploded, sending showers of sparks
cascading through the bridge and CIC. The artificial gravity clicked off, then
on heavily, then off again. I was flung around in the chair so viciously it
seemed my neck would snap. There was a terribly deep wailing, moaning sound
that grew louder and louder until my ears hurt, the lights went out-

Regaining consciousness, for me, was the sort of thing
where you fall into bed outrageously drunk, the bed starts spinning and you
snap awake because you're going to hurl the contents of your stomach onto the
bed. Oh, right, sure, that's never happened to you? Liar. In this case, I awoke
while I was puking into my own lap, or trying to, some chunks hung briefly in
the air as the artificial gravity was off, then on, then off again. The
intermittent zero gee was making my stomach flutter, I clamped my mouth shut so
if I puked again, I wouldn't spew it all over the bridge. And a headache, my
head throbbed so bad it felt like my eyeballs would explode.
"Skippy," I heard myself saying in a strangled voice. "Sitrep,"
was all I could manage to say at that moment.

"We have jumped past the edge of the star system.
All five Thuranin destroyers were engulfed by the solar flare, there are no
ships pursuing us currently. Artificial gravity has stabilized temporarily.
There are numerous injuries to the crew, nothing serious." He didn't
explain his definition of a 'serious' injury. "Damage to the ship is
substantial."

"How bad is it?" I was afraid to hear the
answer.

"Extremely, catastrophically bad. Shut up and let
me talk for a minute." Skippy's voice was flat, none of the usual
snarkiness. "Only reactors One and Five are online, I have initiated an
emergency shut down of reactor Five because it's losing containment. As it is,
the leak will result in additional damage to reactor Three, which is already
shut down. Reactor One has a slight loss of containment, the major problem with
One is that it has almost completely lost cooling capacity, temperatures are in
the red and if they continue to increase, and they will, there will be a
catastrophic explosion that could destroy the aft part of the ship, including
the remaining jump drives. Reactor One's coolant pump is making a sound like if
you put a pack of hyenas in a blender, only louder. Therefore, I am shutting
down reactor One also."

"The problem is a pump?" Seemed simple to
me. "Can you fix it?"

"I called the 1-800 help line for the pump
manufacturer, they transferred me to some guy named 'Bob' in Malaysia, the
monsoon rain was pounding on his roof so bad I could barely hear him. He asked
me to verify the pump was plugged in, then he suggested I turn it off, and back
on again. That didn't help. Also, I'm pretty sure 'Bob' is not his real name.
Joe, for crying out loud, if I could fix the pump, don't you think I would have
done it already? The pump isn't the only problem, the whole cooling system got
peppered with shrapnel from a near-miss."

"The ship will completely lose pow-" I
started to ask.

"I requested you to shut up while I'm talking,
like that was ever going to happen." He sounded tired. "Correct,
after the last two reactors shut down, the ship will have only backup power
from the capacitors. There is enough charge in the jump drive coils for one
more moderate jump, unfortunately such a jump will not get us to the next
closest other star system, and we clearly can't go back where we were. I expect
the Thuranin will detect our current position within two hours, the gamma ray
burst when we jumped in could not be masked, and as we are on the periphery of
their star system, this area is highly likely to be within their sensor
coverage. The Thuranin now know one of their own star carriers is hostile, they
will be calling in reinforcements. Colonel, you may now speak."

"The situation can't be entirely hopeless, or you
wouldn't bother shutting down the reactors. What are our options?" By
options, I meant other than engaging the self-destruct.

"We have one option, two if you include
self-destructing the ship. We use the remaining charge in the jump drive to
leave this position as soon as possible, I am running a diagnostic on the jump
drive coils now, to avoid rupturing the drive during a jump. Our jumps while we
were within the dampening field, and then within my warpage of spacetime,
caused severe damage to the drive coils, only twenty seven percent of the drive
coils can be trusted to function properly at this point."

"Jumping to the middle of interstellar space,
with all the reactors dead and the capacitors draining, sounds like going from
the fire into the frying pan, we're dead either way. Can the reactors be
fixed?"

"The short answer is no. Not with the equipment
onboard. Star carriers travel with a host of support vessels, and are not
designed to sustain themselves for long-term operations. Spare parts, and the
ability to manufacture replacement parts, are in short supply. The long answer
is, shmaybe."

"Shmaybe?" I asked, surprised. This was the
old Skippy I knew.

"Something short of a confident maybe. Given
enough time, and raw materials, the ship might be restored to functioning. I
have a plan. You are not going to like it."

Skippy was right. I didn't like it. I also didn't have
a choice. Or a better idea.

Not having anything useful to do on the bridge, in a
ship with no power, I helped clean up the mess, talked to the crew briefly on
the intercom, and headed off to the sick bay. Not surprisingly, none of the
special forces were there, although the injury report Skippy loaded onto my
iPad listed several broken bones, concussions and soft tissue injuries like
dislocated shoulders among our SpecOps super soldiers. They were taking care of
each other, and remaining alert, as if they needed to be ready to repel
boarders or some crazy stuff like that, they would report to the sickbay when I
gave them an all clear signal. Maybe they simply needed to feel useful, I could
understand that, I felt pretty useless myself at that moment. Chang had the
conn, such that it was, and the duty crew in the CIC was monitoring our
malfunctioning sensor field in case the Thuranin had an extra ship out there
somewhere. Right now, even a Kristang dropship could have shot holes in us.

There were three of the science team in sickbay; one
wrist sprain, one broken nose and bloody forehead combination, plus one broken
leg. Doctor Skippy the mad scientist was taking care of them with his
scary-looking robots, the science team heard my brief status report over the
intercom and naturally had many questions, I had few answers. What I should
have done is walk around the ship reassuring people. Instead, I took a brief
break to splash water on my face and flush the puke taste out of my mouth.

In the cramped Thuranin bathroom, kneeling on the
floor to reach the sink, I addressed Skippy, trying to talk to him the way I
normally did, keep the fear out of my voice. "All right, Skippy, I have to
give you props, even your stupid plans work great."

"Sure, sure, that's what happened. I'm a freakin'
genius."

My Spidey sense tingled. He wasn't fooling me for a
second. "You lying little jerk. Truth, Skippy. The truth shall set you
free."

"I never understood that expression. Lying is so
much easier, Joe."

"Now, Skippy."

"Well, heh, heh, here's the thing," he said,
in his nervous tone that was the reason he could never successfully lie to me.
"My original stupid plan was truly pure genius. The Thuranin would never
have suspected us to try anything that stupid. After I created that solar flare,
much bigger even than I had hoped, by the way, I didn't have much data on that
star and I had to estimate the composition of its photosphere-"

"Get to the point, please, Skippy." My
headache was killing me.

"After I triggered the solar flare, my plan was
to distort spacetime in reverse, to flatten it enough right around the ship
that we could jump away. I knew the Thuranin ships had no chance to escape, the
gravity waves propagated at the speed of light, and those ships were too deep
in the gravity well to jump away. The problem was, I'd never before flattened
spacetime to that extent so deep in a gravity well, it was theoretically
possible, however I didn't have the math for it. I had to guess, go in on blind
faith, that was the stupid part."

"Ok, stupid, but, hey, it worked. We're alive.
Mostly."

"You want the truth, Joe? It didn't work, not
entirely, not the way I planned it." Skippy admitted sadly. "The
flattening spacetime part, I mean. I couldn't make it hold long enough to get
the ship all the way through the jump, the gravity waves made spacetime
resonate in a way I couldn't predict, and I didn't have time to create a model
and test it. I failed, I totally failed."

"Then how are we still alive?"

"You monkeys would describe it as luck. The
gravity waves on this end of the wormhole caused a resonance in spacetime that
made the wormhole fail as we entered it, the presence of the ship inside the
wormhole made the resonance increase exponentially. The laws of physics here
are an annoying pain most of the time, but in this case they saved our asses.
Because the ship had already emerged from the far end of the wormhole before we
entered it on the near end, it would have violated causality for the ship to be
destroyed while in transit. The universe doesn't allow causality to be messed
with in that way, so it collapsed all the probabilities, except for the
extremely unlikely one where we somehow survived the transit and emerged safely
on the far end. It's kind of like sending a message via internet protocol, the
message gets chopped up into bits that take different routes to the
destination, then it is reassembled. That's why you were nauseous and now have
a headache, your body was ripped apart at the subatomic level and reassembled
many times. What you experienced, the ship seeming to blink in and out of
existence, actually happened; every time the ship was destroyed in transit, the
universe hit the reset button and restored us to existence. Because it had
to."

I shook my head in stunned disbelief. "Wait, we died?
Except we didn't?"

"Correct. Because we hadn't died on the far end
of the wormhole, we couldn't die on the near end, or in transit."

"Whoa."

"Whoa indeed. Joe, this is a tiny, tiny glimpse
into how the universe truly works."

"Awesome! We can figure out the rest from here,
huh?"

"Mmm, that would be a resounding no. Let me give
you an example; a dog sees you bring a new bag of kibble into the house. The
dog may see you getting the bag of kibble out of the car. You can even take the
dog to the pet store with you, and the dog can see you take the bag of kibble
off the shelf there. That does not mean the dog grasps the concept of where
kibble really comes from. Or the concept of, well, concepts."

"Thank you for the big vote of confidence in us
monkeys."

"I'm being realistic here, Joe. Your smartest
theoretical physicists are still only staring at the garage door, thinking that
is the magical source of endless kibble."

I wasn't going to argue with an AI about the merits of
monkey brain power. "Let's keep this luck part between us, agreed? The
crew needs to have confidence in you, misplaced as it is." I looked at
myself in the mirror, a mirror we humans had installed, since Thuranin cyborgs
had thought such things were foolish. Most of the vomit was off my uniform, or
mashed enough into the digital camo pattern that it looked as if it belonged
there. My face looked like hell. I needed sleep. As if that was going to happen
any time soon. Unbelievable, I was alive only because the future me on the
other end of the wormhole hadn’t died. A thought occurred to me. "Wait.
What did you say about the version of the
Dutchman
that came out of the
wormhole? What do you mean 'version'?"

"Hmm. That's not something I can tell to monkeys.
Shouldn't have mentioned it."

"Fine. I got a whopping headache anyway. What's
next?"

We made one last jump using remaining power in the
jump drive capacitors. Then we jumped again, and again, and again. Power for
the jumps, and almost everything else aboard the
Dutchman
, came directly
from Skippy; he pulled power from some other spacetime or from quantum bubbles
or from magical fairy dust or some crazy shit like that. I didn't understand it
and our science team, despite nodding their heads in deep thought, had no
freakin' clue what Skippy was doing either. The problem with Skippy powering
the ship is, whatever source he pulled power from was enormous, like a small
star, and he wasn't able to regulate the power flow very well, he wasn't
designed to do that. The result of him pulling in way too much power, was we
kept blowing systems all over the ship. Relays burned out, capacitors melted,
anything related to electricity had a short life span, and it was a race
against time; could Skippy get us to our destination before we blew every
circuit in the ship?

To reduce power needs, we had no stealth field,
shields were at minimum power to protect us only against microscopic impacts
from space debris, and life support like heat, lights and oxygen recycling were
cut back. Some parts of the ship were evacuated, so we could entirely cut power
to those areas. Artificial gravity was lowered to 18%, that system's most
efficient power setting, other than being switched off. I wasn't ready for zero
gee yet.

Eighteen people were living aboard the
Flower
,
because that ship had plenty of power, although that little ship was pushing
its limits to supply fresh oxygen and expel waste heat from eighteen living,
breathing humans. The
Flower
had detached from its docking platform and
was now grappled directly onto the
Dutchman's
spine frame, we'd moved
the little ship closer so it could supply partial power to its mother ship.
That hadn't worked well, Skippy had to jury-rig power transfer cables, and the
two ships' systems weren't compatible. Conditions aboard the
Flower
were
not only cramped, people there were living in the zero gee, because the
Kristang didn't have artificial gravity technology. Our special forces saw this
as an opportunity for zero gee combat training. That was a good idea, and it
kept people busy and focused.