Brushfire, p.55
Brushfire, page 55
part #11 of Expeditionary Force Series
Stopping the transfer of obsolete starships was not the goal of the Anacleon’s crew, that cruiser and the other warships waiting with the star carrier instead wanted to know where those ships were going. The humans were rumored to have a secure base somewhere in the galaxy, and while the Rindhalu had a solid guess about the location of that base, they didn’t know for certain. More important than where the base was, they wanted to know how the humans attained access to the secure star system. If they could learn the secret of manipulating wormholes, the balance of power in the galaxy would be permanently altered in their favor.
What the Anacleon’s crew and AI expected to see was a cluster of Jeraptha starships, possibly accompanied by a few human ships. Most likely, they would detect only residual radiation from multiple ships jumping away, after the humans arrived at the rendezvous point. In that case, the cruiser would jump farther and farther away, until it directly detected the gamma rays of the actual jump wormholes. Once the timing of the event was established, the cruiser would jump back to the star carrier, to bring in the other five ships to conduct a detailed search. They wanted to know where the Jeraptha ships had jumped to, so they could follow. Trying to pinpoint the destination of one or a few ships jumping, so long after the event, was futile even for Rindhalu technology. But when twenty or more ships jumped, especially with old and obsolete drives, enough information would be provided by the residual resonances to make their destination clear.
Prepared to listen for faint echoes of resonance, the sensors of the Anacleon were deafened by the blast of photons coming in from the star system, shocking in both volume and source.
Maxohlx ships.
More than a thousand Maxohlx warships and support vessels, making no attempt to conceal their activities. In addition to ships flying around, there was radiation and debris indicating a major battle had been fought in the star system. A battle between the Maxohlx, and, who?
Repeated jumps farther and farther away from the site of the battle, seeing light from further and further back in time, revealed the battle, as if the Anacleon was seeing the events in real-time. The ghost ship, the battlecruiser now known to be controlled by humans, had jumped into an ambush. Just as it was about to succumb to intense enemy fire, the battlecruiser simply stopped dead in space. Then, nanoseconds after it passed beyond the enemy damping fields, the ship called Valkyrie disappeared in a ragged burst of gamma rays.
For a short time, while they analyzed the data to understand how the hell an entire starship could ignore the laws of physics, the crew of the Anacleon shuddered with relief that the human ship had escaped the ambush.
Then the Valkyrie reappeared, near an ice giant planet. There was a brief battle, and the battlecruiser deliberately descended into the dense layer of clouds.
The purpose of the battle became clear, horrifyingly clear.
The Maxohlx intended to capture the Elder AI, force it to do their bidding.
Once again, the cruiser slipped away through a tear in spacetime, back to the waiting star carrier. Rather than releasing the other ships to scan for residual jump resonance, the star carrier performed an emergency separation, ejecting its burden so it could travel faster.
The star carrier had a new mission.
It needed to summon a war fleet.
“Ugh. Joe, if I tell you something, will you promise not to freak out and overreact?”
Giving him an honest answer required me to think about it for a moment. I was in my office, with not much to do other than fear that my stupidity had doomed my ship. “Jeez, Skippy, it kind of depends on what you tell me.”
“OK, then forget I said anything.”
“Whoa! Whoa, hold on there,” I leaned across the desk to glare at his avatar. “No way do you get to tease me like that. Tell me.”
“It’s really better that I don’t.”
“I’ll decide if you’re right or not, after you tell me.”
“Um, you know how you said that people are supposed to protect their friends, especially if their friend is a knucklehead?”
“I am a knucklehead sometimes.”
“Wow. Good for you, Joe. The first step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have-”
“I am also the captain of this ship. I need to know whatever it is you know, so tell me.”
“Maybe I don’t feel like telling you,” he sniffed.
“Maybe, I will make that a direct order. What do you know?”
“Technically, I don’t know anything. I suspect that-”
“Tell me!”
“OK, OK. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. There might have been a Rindhalu ship in this system.”
I slumped in the chair. “Crap. When? Like, they surveyed this place a thousand years ago and forgot about it?”
“No. four days ago.”
“Four days? When the hell were you going to-”
“See? This is what I meant by overreacting. Might. There might have been a Rindhalu ship here. Briefly.”
Calm, cool and professional, I reminded myself. The captain of a ship, the leader of any organization, must be calm, cool and professional. What I wanted to do was wrap my hands around his avatar’s neck. What I needed to do was coax information out of him. “Might. Sorry, I understand now why you were reluctant to tell me. How about I shut up while you explain.”
“Um, OK,” he was surprised. “I am only telling you this now, because I just now learned about it.” He paused.
“Go on.”
“Oh. I was expecting you to ask a stupid question.”
“Any question I could ask at this point would be stupid, so please continue.”
“Hmm.” He didn’t know how to react when I refused to banter with him. “You know how Rindhalu ships are difficult to detect when they jump?”
“You mentioned that, yes.” The technique for detecting spider ships was different from the standard procedure, that technique was part of the training for our pilots, and anyone qualified to operate the ship’s sensor suite. “The radiation is in the infrared range, right?”
“Correct. It is also faint, you have to be looking for it. The stupid kitties upstairs were not looking for it, their sensors were tuned to search for regular gamma rays. Four days ago, the sensors of multiple ships on patrol at the far edge of the system picked up an anomaly in the infrared band, but they didn’t realize it. I only know because I collated data from more than three dozen ships. Ironically, if the kitties did not have their ships set for cyber-secure condition, their computers would have been networked together, and they might have detected the infrared pulse. That is interesting. Their procedures to defend against the Rindhalu actually make it more difficult for them to detect, and fight, the spiders.”
“We need to remember that,” I muttered softly, encouraging him to keep talking.
“Good point. So, when my malware got established aboard the enemy fleet up there, I got access to their sensor logs, and I just finished reviewing it. The data is incomplete, of course.”
“Of course. I know it’s not fair to ask you to guess, but if you had to guess,” sucking up to him was making me nauseous. “You think this anomaly was a spider ship?”
“Mmm, yes. It could be. If a spider ship was here, the anomaly I saw was the ship jumping away. Logically, it must have jumped in before that, but I can’t find any sign of it in the Maxohlx sensor logs. Stupid kitties.”
“What kind of shmaybe can you give me, your level of confidence?”
“Considering how freakin’ clueless the kitties are, it’s a miracle I detected anything at all. If they saw anything, they probably think it is background radiation.”
“I get that. It’s yet another example of your awesomeness,” my patience with sucking up was wearing thin.
“All I’m saying is, don’t get your hopes up. I mean, if the spiders, jumped in, they must have seen what is going on here, right? Why haven’t they confronted the kitties?”
“One ship can’t do anything useful. All right,” I sat back in the chair to stare at the ceiling. “Assume that ship went to call for reinforcements. What’s the minimum time it would take to bring a spider fleet here?”
“Well, the closest Rindhalu base is- No, you asked about time, not distance,” he muttered. “Hmm. With zero turn-around time, the spiders could get here in nine days. So, five days from now.”
“Zero turn-around time is not realistic,” I considered. “Even if a fleet was ready for deployment, it takes time to analyze the data, and make a decision.”
“True. Joe, there is also another issue. Outside the core systems that are too far from here to be of help, no single Rindhalu fleet base has enough ships to take on the Maxohlx ships here. They would need, hmm, let me think about this. The spiders would need to bring in at least three task forces, to be reasonably assured of a fair fight. Minimum time to notify those task forces, and hmm, flight time here,” he was muttering to himself. “Sixteen days. Minimum.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen. The spiders never make a decision when they can avoid making one, right?”
“That reputation is not entirely accurate, Joe,” he advised. “Mostly, it applies to their senior policy-makers. Their fleet commanders, those who actually control and fly warships, tend to be younger and more aggressive. We may be in luck there.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Because the spiders would have to be suicidally blind not to see the threat to them, if the Maxohlx get control of me. They have to move fast.”
“Sixteen days, huh?”
“Minimum,” he cautioned.
“I heard that, yeah. OK.”
Unlike my previous fool-proof method of keeping distressing yet important information to myself, a method that had worked just wonderfully in the past, I told the senior staff about Skippy’s probable sighting of a Rindhalu ship. If he was correct, that was good and surprising news. Good, because it meant the spiders already knew what was going on with us, and that should shorten the time we had to wait for them to arrive. Surprising, because it meant the spiders arrived very soon after we left a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow. They must have had a major effort to hunt for information about the second group of ships to be transferred to us.
Really, other than giving us a warm fuzzy feeling that perhaps we didn’t have to wait quite as long for the cavalry to arrive, hearing that a Rindhalu ship might have been here didn’t change anything for us.
We still had to wait.
Until the Maxohlx changed the rules, again.
“Uh oh, Joe,” Skippy said. Only it wasn’t Skippy in his usual admiral’s avatar. He was sitting on an enormous mushroom, and he looked like a caterpillar, or some sort of slug. He was also chewing on what looked like the world’s largest Twizzler. What the hell was going on? “Joe?” He called. “Joe, can you hear me?”
“Yes. I don’t want to hear you.”
“Wake up!” He shouted.
I did.
Huh. That explained the mushroom and Twizzler thing. I had been dreaming.
“Wha-” I blinked at his usual avatar. “What time is it?”
“Oh-one-forty-five. Joe, we might have a problem.”
“If we only might have a problem, can I go back to sleep?”
“How about you decide after you hear what the problem is?”
Shit. Now that I was awake, I had to pee anyway. “Crap. OK, go ahead. Keep the lights off, please.” There was still a hope that I could get back to sleep for another three hours.
“You know the kitties brought fleet-support ships with them.”
That was a statement, not a question, but I knew what he meant. “Yeah, sure. They can perform maintenance on their ships and stay here a long time, so?”
“So, over the past two days, the fabricators on those support ships have been very active, cranking out components continuously. The Maxohlx have deployed a fleet of tugs to mine asteroids for raw materials.”
“Maybe the admiral,” I mumbled through a jaw-stretching yawn. Damn it, I do not think well when I’m sleepy. “Decided to remodel his bathroom or something.”
“Try to be serious, Joe. The kitties are constructing something out there.”
“That’s it? They are constructing something?”
“I assume they are not making a birthday present for you, dumdum. This could be very dangerous to us.”
“Can you just tell me what it is?”
“A picture is worth a thousand words. You should look at it.”
“If I do, will you go away.”
“Sure.”
Any notion of pleasantly drifting back to sleep was wiped away, when I saw the- The whatever it was. “What the hell is that?”
“I wish I knew for sure. Querying a database up there would risk exposing I have access to their systems, and-”
“No! Don’t do that. Have you been able to intercept any comms about, whatever those things are?”
“Sort of. There are references to ‘platforms’ and a ‘grid’, but that’s all I know. The kitties are keeping information about this project very tightly controlled. One particular frigate regularly jumps back and forth between the blockade and the support ships. It must be acting as a courier, physically carrying data back and forth. Joe, unfortunately, the kitties are being very careful with their information security.”
“Of course they are. They’re afraid of you.” That wasn’t something I said to suck up to him, it was the simple truth. Looking again at my tablet, I zoomed in the image to point where it was too fuzzy to be useful. Sixteen ships, that Skippy identified as heavy cruisers, had things attached to them. Some type of girders or framework surrounded the center of each ship. The frames were not thick or sturdy enough to support the mass of another ship, so they weren’t some way to connect ships together. Sixteen ships had apparently been completed and were moving away from the cluster of support ships. A line of heavy cruisers was approaching, presumably to be fitted with the, whatever the framework was. There was a long line of heavy cruisers of various classes, what caught my eye was the number. A total of eighty-eight ships had been or were being modified. Plus maybe more ships would jump in to join the line. What the hell were the kitties doing out there? “Can you guess?” I asked. “That framework looks like, antennas?”
“Good guess, Joe, that’s what I think too.”
“What kind of antenna?”
“You’re not going to like this.”
“I will like it even less, if it becomes a real problem, and we could have done something about it.”
“OK.” He took a breath. “Basically, I think those ships are intended to cluster together, with antennas creating a sort of tractor beam between them.”
“Tractor beam?” I laughed. “This isn’t Star Trek.”
“I’m being serious, Joe. Call it whatever you want, it is a field that can be extended far from the ships, and pull matter towards the antenna.”
“Ohhhh, shit.”
“Yeah. You see why this could be a problem?”
“I hope I’m wrong about this. If those ships were in orbit, how far down could that field reach?”
“To the ice layer. But I don’t think the ships will be in orbit. I think that if they are needed, they will descend down to our level, maybe deeper. If they do that, the tractor beam could extend far down into the ice.”
Admiral Reichert was calling my bluff. He couldn’t risk hitting Valkyrie while we were deep in the atmosphere, because the ship might explode and Skippy could fall down deep into the ice toward the planet’s core.
But if he had a device that could dig into that ice, and pull Skippy’s canister up, then Valkyrie was toast. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. “Damn it!” I slapped the bed, a less emphatic gesture than I intended, and swung my legs onto the deck. “Will it work?”
“It is a technology the Maxohlx use for mining. This is a highly unusual and large-scale adaptation of that tech, I really do not know if they can scale it up successfully.”
“How soon will they be ready?”
“To use the device, or to test it?”
“Test it, right,” I muttered to myself. “They will want to test it first. Crap, Reichert will show the test results to me, taunt me with them.”
“Joe, I can’t guess the schedule for a test program. At the rate they are converting ships, they will have all eighty-eight ships completed in nine days.”
CHAPTER THIRTY SIX
Crap. Three days later, Skippy confirmed that schedule. We could see that eleven ships were linked together, testing the device, and it was clear they found problems, because those ships went back to have their framework modified. A second test, in space, was conducted, apparently with more success. Then they conducted a test with twenty-two ships, hovering over a large, rocky asteroid. An energy field that looked like a hollow lance slowly extended down toward the asteroid’s dull gray surface, then punched into it like a plasma cutter. In the center of the field, chunks of glowing debris were pulled up between and past the ring of ships, being ejected out beyond them like a fountain. That test continued until they had bored a hole all the way through the asteroid, that was seven hundred kilometers across.
“That is not good news,” Skippy grumbled. “Not good for us. That asteroid is dense and iron-rich, not easy to drill into. Their tractor beam lance should easily penetrate the layer of water and methane ice below us.”
