Task Force Hammer - Chapter One
CHAPTER ONE
Jesse Colter grunted as he ground through another set of deep knee bends, while holding thirty
pound weights in each hand. Clearing space for exercise in the bedroom had required pushing the bed
against the wall, and it would have been easier for him to work out at the base gym, but he had already
done the recommended type and number of exercises at the base physical therapy office, and he didn’t
want anyone reporting him for exceeding doctor’s orders. The Army doctors didn’t have a bum leg, he
did, and he was determined to do everything he could to be ready to return to full duty. His current
restricted duty meant he got stuck at a desk doing administrative busywork, while his wife trained
sniper teams. Dave Czajka was in Belize for training with a squad of Verd-kris. Dave’s wife Emily was
in Colorado, preparing the Mavericks for whatever dirty and dangerous job Def Com assigned next. Joe
Bishop? Jesse didn’t exactly know where Joe was, though rumor had it the Merry Band of Pirates were
out somewhere, taking the fight to the Moonraider. Everyone was in action, or training for it, while
Jesse processed paperwork.
The next time, he was not getting stuck at home while the Mavs went into action. That the Mavs
would be going into action again, and soon, was not a question in his mind. Jesse couldn’t imagine
what a cavalry force could do against the Moonraider, stopping the threat from a hostile Elder AI was a
job for the Merry Band of Pirates. But, while the Special Mission Group got all the glory, units like the
Mavericks did do whatever thankless, dirty work that Un-dick needed someone to handle. Whenever
the Mavs shipped out, he was going to be ready.
Shauna’s parents were thrilled to care for their grandson, that’s why Jesse’s father-in-law was in the
kitchen while Jesse prepared to take the Infantry Fitness Test in three days. He would pass the test, he
would return to full duty, and hopefully he would persuade his thrill-seeking wife to sit out the next
offworld assignment.
Like that was ever gonna happen, he thought as he winced, a throbbing pain making his legs
wobble. Dull pain was better than sharp pain, so he slowed down his motions, focusing on keeping
proper form while-
“Jesse!” His father-in-law called from the front of the house. “There’s some fellers here to see
you.”’
Jesse set the weights on the floor, mopping his sweating face with a towel. He wasn’t expecting
company on a Saturday morning. “Who is it?”2
“Come see for yourself.” The reply carried a note of amusement.
Probably neighborhood children selling cookies or something, Jesse thought as he grabbed his
wallet. What did Shauna like? Was it Thin Mints? He should buy several different boxes just to be safe.
“Pops?” He raised an eyebrow at the older man standing in the doorway, the front door mostly
closed.
“I think those two are fellers,” Pops shrugged. “Never can tell with beetles, I know their antennas
are supposed to be different but,” another shrug.
Beetles? What were Jeraptha doing at his house? Oh no. Were they delivering bad news? That-
Made no sense, he told himself. Unless-
His stomach tied in knots.
He flung the door open, to see two Jeraptha, wearing dark formal suits, he knew their outfits were
formal because of the large floppy box ties they wore around their necks, and the little triangular hats
between their main antennas. Males, they were indeed ‘fellers’ as Pops had guessed.
In their foreclaws, they each held, books? What appeared to be leather-bound books, though not
very thick. Tucked under the front cover of each book was a colorful pamphlet,
His stomach unknotted and he almost laughed. “Hi, I’m Jesse Colter, how can I help you?” Before
either of the aliens could answer, he added, “If ya’ll want me to sign up for SkipWay, you can keep
right on walkin’.”
“SkipWay?” The one on the left glanced at the one on the right. “No, not today. Although if you are
interested in getting in on the ground floor of a fast-growing-”
“I said ‘No’, and I said it in a neighborly fashion.”
“Yes,” the left one bobbed its head, bowing its antennas. “You did, please forgive us. We are but
humble missionaries. In these especially troubled times, it is our privilege to spread the joyously Good
Word.”
“Oh man, you- If you’re asking whether I want to hear about the guru Skippy, I have met that a-
hole, and I don’t-”
Both Jeraptha chuckled, a dry wheezing sound. “Skippy is indeed an asshole. I am a diamond level
SkipWay associate, and even I freely admit our founder is a scoundrel.”
“Oh good,” Jesse relaxed a bit. “What is it ya’ll are missionaries for again?”
They both clutched their books, holding them up. The left one continued. “It has come to the
attention of my people that the valiant citizens of Earth have suffered greatly since the event you call3
‘Columbus Day’, and now we are all thrown into peril by the being called ‘Moonraider’, yet we see
you have not taken full advantage of opportunities that could provide solace and comfort in these trying
times.”
Oh, here it comes, Jesse groaned silently. They want to sell something, or spread the gospel of,
whatever the beetles were into spiritually. Probably not any form of yoga, he guessed, their bodies
weren’t super flexible. “Can we cut this short? I need to-”
“Have you considered embracing the fun, exciting, and growing community of gambling? Millions
of your fellow humans have seen the light and-”
“Hold on there. Ya’ll are missionaries spreading the Good Word, about gambling?”
“Yes. We are with Gambler’s Anonymous. We understand that some people have heard the Good
Word and would like to embrace wagering, but they don’t know how, or they are afraid of looking
foolish when they start. We offer a fun, anonymous, and completely confidential way to begin your
journey to a more rewarding life.”
“Um, give my brain a minute to catch up, please?”
“Certainly. Would you like a pamphlet to read?”
“Maybe later.”
“Each pamphlet comes with a voucher worth ten dollars to stake your first wager.”
Jesse frowned, and slowly shook his head.
“It also comes with a coupon for two free breakfasts at the Waffle House.”
“The Waffle House?”
“We have found that offering such coupons as, what do your people call it, a ‘sweetener’, boosts
acceptance of our pamphlets by forty percent.”
The one on the right spoke for the first time, holding up a pamphlet. “You can alternatively get a
coupon for Taco Bell, if you like.”
“I would not like,” Jesse declared with a sour face.
“Waffle House it is, then,” the left one stuffed a pamphlet into Jesse’s hand.
“Um-” What the hell, he thought. A free breakfast is a free breakfast.
“We hope you enjoy your Waffle House experience.”
“The true Waffle House experience is when you’re drunk at four in the morning and coffee gets
spilled in your lap ’cause two rednecks get into a fist fight, but thanks for this,” he rolled up the
pamphlet and tucked it in a back pocket. “The two of ya’ll are walking around door to door, trying to4
get people to place wagers with you? Are you bookies?”
“Alas, no, neither of us could aspire to such an exalted position of trust in our society.”
“We also can’t afford to bribe Central Wagering for a bookie license,” the right one muttered.
With drooping mandibles and antennas, the left one continued with, “We too, once lost our passion
for gambling.”
“Along with my house, my job, and my marriage,” the right one added.
“As I was saying,” the left one poked his companion with a leg. “Having rediscovered our passion
for gambling, we wish to spread the word-”
“And pay off part of our debt-” The right one dodged another kick.
“What matters is,” left one stepped forward, pushing the other beetle out of the way. “We would
like to invite you, and your family and friends, to join us at the Bingo Hall down the street any evening
this week, for a celebration of one of our most important holidays.”
“Um, well, I’m probably busy that day and-”
“There will be food. And alcohol. Um, this is not what you call a ‘dry county’, is it?”
“It isn’t. You Gamblers Anonymous people have holidays?”
“Of course,” the beetle seemed surprised by the question. “Please say you will join us in
celebrating that most glorious event,” the left one clasped his claws together and cast his eyes toward
the sky, “March Madness.”
“Here,” Jesse tore the coupon from the pamphlet and gave it to his father-in-law.
The man stared at the piece of paper, looking up at Jesse in astonishment. “Those two are with the
Waffle House?”
“Nah, they’re with a different kind of ‘house’,” he knew that was a gambling term for a casino.
“It’s interesting.”
“What?”
“Out there, I thought I had seen everything, that nothing could surprise me anymore. Then,
weirdness shows up right at my door and,” he grinned. “I know I ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
“Hey like, that time was thirty eight percent,” Bilby drawled as that number flashed on the main
display, just after a soft chime sounded. “That’s not good, General Dude.”
“Yeah,” I agreed, feeling that I needed to acknowledge what he said, and not knowing how else I5
could respond. We were fucked, or would be soon.
That chime indicated another enemy active sensor pulse had swept over Valkyrie, an event that had
occurred seven times in the past two hours. Thirty eight percent was the probability that the Maxohlx
warship hunting for us would get a solid sensor return; a ping coming back that indicated something
was at our location. Anything above thirty percent was uncomfortable for us, since our battlecruiser
was unable to jump at the moment. Also unable to fight, or to use sensors accurately enough to hit
anything even if we could shoot, which we couldn’t. We also had no defensive shields, and no stealth
field. Skippy was surrounding the ship with a stealth bubble he was creating, and though maintaining
that field was taking up nearly all of his focus, it wasn’t his best work. He overall wasn’t at his best, the
battle when we used Elder weapons against the Outsider’s starship had been rough on him, and even
rougher on the ship.
Thirty percent probability was the effective limit for our safety, and that wasn’t just a guess, Skippy
had exact specifications on the enemy sensor system that was a mere fifty five lightseconds away. He
knew not only that the ship pinging away to find us was a Maxohlx Herva-class destroyer, he
recognized the signature of the pings as belonging specifically to the Pride of Karalvos. That destroyer
had seen extensive service during the recent Maxohlx civil war and had not yet gone into a shipyard for
a refit. That fact fit a pattern we had noticed among the ships that had been assigned to protect the
Moonraider: they were not the best weapon and sensor platforms the Hegemony had. When I
commented the kitties had sent only six hundred warships to the Sentinel activation site near 27 Canis
Majoris, I noted they had hedged their bets. The Hegemony leadership had provided enough ships to be
impressive, not enough to be a true guarantee of victory. They had held back the vast majority of their
fleet, and their most powerful warships, in case their new best buddy Moonraider stabbed them in the
back.
Like a backstabbing was ever not going to happen.
Stupid, rotten, delusional kitties.
For the past two hours since we detected a Maxohlx destroyer jumping in fifty three lightseconds
away, we had all held our breath every time a powerful sensor pulse swept past our ship. The enemy
was moving slowly away, the strength of the pulses was growing slightly weaker each minute, and no
individual pulse could burn through the stealth field Skippy was providing. That didn’t matter. The AI
of the enemy ship was assembling a view of the area by combining data from each weak sensor return,
and eventually that AI would determine ‘Hey there is something out there’. That something was likely6
to be a starship, since we were in the empty gulf between stars. And since the unknown object had not
pinged back with a Maxohlx recognition code, the ship was likely to be Valkyrie.
“How long?” I asked from the seat next to Reed, the chair normally occupied by the executive
officer. With the ship in danger, I had offered to sit in the observer’s section along the back bulkhead of
the bridge, but Reed had shot down that bullshit. “Nuh uh, Sir,” she had told me. “You broke the ship,
you need to fix it.”
Bilby knew my question was directed at him, and he knew what I was asking. How long until the
enemy destroyer’s AI had enough data to know it wasn’t alone? “Like, my best guess is five more
sensor pulses before that destroyer has a lock on our location? I could be wrong by one pulse either
way, so it could be as soon as thirty minutes. Your next question is how long to get the jump drive
working again?”
“Affirmative.”
“That is still sixty eight minutes, and there is no way to make that happen any faster. Sorry man, I
know this is bogus.”
“It is what it is.”
“Ooooh, I like your attitude. That’s like, Zen, Dude.”
“That is bullshit, but thanks for putting a good spin on this shit show. OK, Fireball, we need to buy
time to get the drive fixed. Light the candles.” My choice of words could have been better, in the past I
had referred to Valkyrie’s booster motors as ‘candles’. In that case, I wasn’t referring at anything that
caught fire, so it really wasn’t anything similar to a candle. The reference was to a candle in the
darkness, something that was guaranteed to attract the enemy’s attention. “Let me make that more
clear: initiate Operation Whack A Mole.”
“Yes, Sir. Comms,” she raised a hand and crooked a finger to an officer behind her. “Initiate the
Whack A Mole sequence.”
After the battle against Moonraider that actually the Outsider, Valkyrie had been damaged even
worse than Skippy expected, and he had expected severe damage. The unhappy surprise had been that
the jump drive was offline and needed a complete recalibration; the individual components weren’t
working together or even talking to each other. With Skippy directly controlling the virtual drive coils
with an extreme level of precision that exhausted him, we had managed to perform a short jump away
from the battlespace before the surviving Maxohlx warships could get their shit together to hit us.7
Unfortunately, what Skippy had actually attempted was a medium-length jump, that fell far short of the
distance we intended to travel. We also emerged about seventy degrees off course. Oh, and that short
no-good jump also totally dorked up the drive, so we hadn’t been able to jump again. Skippy was
working on the drive, along with enveloping us in a stealth field. The stealth field was not his usual
quality work, it was the sort of stealth field you would find in a bin next to the checkout stand at a local
gas station convenience store, where the packaging is dented and dusty, and the cardboard smells
vaguely like it has absorbed years of odors from gas station hotdogs.
Oh, also, the United Nations Navy 3rd Fleet had no idea where we were, and no practical way to
find us. We hadn’t jumped to the primary or any of the four backup rendezvous points. The effect of
deploying Elder weapons had done bad things to spacetime, severing the connections of the Elder
comm nodes we relied on for FTL links between ships. The result was we weren’t where we were
supposed to be, and we also had no way to tell the 3rd Fleet where we were.
So, we were doing just great even before the Maxohlx fleet started hunting for us.
What we needed to do, in addition to what we were already doing to fix the ship, was to buy time.
So Skippy could fix the jump drive well enough to get the hell out of there. When I say ‘we’ of course I
don’t mean myself, but Skippy wasn’t doing all the work by himself. Bilby was assisting by
coordinating maintenance bots, that wasn’t new. What was new since I had left command of Valkyrie
was that filthy monkeys were helping, and by ‘helping’ I don’t mean simply staying out of Skippy’s
way. The engineering team was being useful, testing coil generators, and physically disconnecting coils
that couldn’t be made to work together. The astonishing thing to me was the engineers were working in
their own initiative, understanding coil technology well enough to know which components were junk.
Even two AIs and a barrel full of monkeys couldn’t make the coils work together fast enough for
us to jump away before the Pride of Karalvos inevitably found us. When that happened, a smart
destroyer captain would drop an active sensor buoy to mark the location, and jump away to alert the big
warships. A gutsy destroyer captain would launch a salvo of missiles at us first, and then jump away.
Those missiles would tear Valkyrie apart.
Time. We needed to buy time.
By making the enemy destroyer unwittingly play Whack A Mole.
Our activation signal wasn’t in the form of a detectable active pulse, it was a very faint change in
the background radiation, a change that only our moles out there knew how to interpret. Eight minutes8
after we disappointingly jumped into the middle of nowhere, Reed had ordered the launch of high-
speed drones to deploy decoys in a sphere around us, each drone dropping off five automated moles;
stealthed machines the size of a baseball. The drones boosted and slowed repeatedly to launch the
moles, crisscrossing an area a hundred thousand kilometers away to create sphere that did not
encompass our ship. Within that slowly expanding sphere, the moles were coasting randomly, in no
predictable pattern. At our signal to initiate the sequence, the moles activated in a sequence. The first
mole extended a field that faintly reflected the next enemy sensor pulse. Faint, yet significantly
stronger than the returns the destroyer had been getting from our partially stealthed battlecruiser. It was
the sort of sensor echo that might be generated by an active pulse bouncing off a failing stealth field
that surrounded a large object. Like a battlecruiser.
After popping its head up for a moment, that first mole then deactivated its reflector, and again
wrapped itself in a tight stealth field.
The destroyer didn’t take the bait immediately. That disappointed me and surprised me. Was the
enemy captain overly cautious? No, I realized. Our opponent was wary, very reasonably so. The crew
of that ship knew they were searching for the fabled ghost ship Valkyrie, and they were alert for
deception, darn it. The reputation of the Merry Band of Pirates was working against us.
The second mole popped its head up, its reflector set to return an even weaker signal. That
apparently was convincing to the enemy, the next set of pulses was targeted in a cone rather than
radiating out in every direction.
The second mole kept just the top of its virtual head up, the reflector extended only a tenth of its
maximum diameter. After a targeted pulse bounced off the reflector, that mole also went dormant.
“It’s taking the bait!” Bilby shouted, his slacker avatar appearing to pump a fist. “Like, that is
confirmed! The Karalvos is turning and burning, on a vector to intercept the second mole.”
“It hasn’t jumped?” I asked. That was another surprise. The destroyer was only a few lightseconds
from the mole, a flight to close that distance through normal space even in a speedy ship would take
too much time. Why was-
Oh of course. That enemy captain was wary of exactly the kind of trick we were playing. Did the
Maxohlx have a carnival game similar to Whack A Mole? Did they even have carnivals?
“It hasn’t, like, jumped yet, the- Oh, it’s gone.”
“Bilby,” Reed pressed her lips together, the way she did when she was irritated at the ship’s AI she
inherited from me. “Gone meaning it jumped? Or it engaged stealth?”9
“Oh like, sorry. It jumped, I detected gamma rays.”
“Pilot,” Reed didn’t waste any time. “Turn and burn at one tenth power, come right to one one
seven, mark zero nine zero.”
With the artificial gravity system not fully operational, we felt the ship accelerating away from the
sphere of moles, and the engines surged alarmingly until Reed ordered thrust reduced to seven percent.
Twenty seconds after that, Bilby announced he had detected another gamma ray burst.
“It’s barely above background level,” Bilby drawled, “but I recognize the drive signature. The
destroyer jumped to investigate the first two moles.”
Reed ordered the reactionless engines shut off. We had changed position and course, hopefully
making the enemy’s job more difficult if the destroyer gave up trying to chase moles and returned to a
wide search.
We watched silently as the Maxohlx ship chased one mole after another, as those little machines
popped up on sensors sweeps, then disappeared. That ship’s crew had to be tearing their fur out in
frustration. They were getting just enough sensor data to require investigating the contacts, but not
enough to determine whether there was just a glitch in their sensor equipment. The random locations of
the contacts had to make the Maxohlx crew consider that they might only be detecting false echoes;
glitches in their aging sensor array. That’s what we hoped the kitties would think, so they would go
away, and resume the search far away from us.
“How much longer will that ship keep searching here?” Reed asked quietly. “It must have been
assigned a search grid, there has to be a time limit to how long each ship is allowed to search a
particular area? The Maxohlx are not known to encourage initiative in their ship captains?”
“Not recently,” I snorted quietly. It used to be that the Hegemony expected admirals and captains
on deployment to use their best judgement, and not limit their actions to those prescribed by rigid
doctrine.
The Hegemony military used to be that way. Then, admirals and captains had acted a bit too
independently, and their society was plunged into a vicious civil war.
A civil war that was started by me.
That Joe Bishop guy can be a real jerk sometimes.
The fact is, the late unlamented Admiral Reichert was totally innocent of the actions Skippy and I
framed him for, and I have not lost a single second sleep over what I did. Reichert was a supremely
arrogant, murderous asshole with a monstrous yet fragile ego, in a society full of murderous assholes10
with fragile egos. Fuck him. The best thing he did for the galaxy was to be executed on false charges. I
only regret I hadn’t thought of framing him sooner.
Anyway, since only Skippy and I knew Reichert had not actually intended to overthrow the
Hegemony leadership, the Maxohlx military had severely clamped down on the level of independence
their commanders in the field were allowed to exercise.
“Let’s hope,” I added quietly for her ears only, “that ship runs out of time here and has to jump
away.” I did some quick math in my head. “In, sixteen minutes, it will have been here for the Maxohlx
equivalent of an hour. A nice round number, to set a limit on its search?”
“That would be nice,” Reed replied in a tone that indicated she wasn’t getting her hopes up for a
convenient end to our predicament.
Twenty nine minutes. That’s how long we needed before our jump drive would be fixed. Not fixed,
it would still be in terrible condition. Good enough for us to perform a medium length jump, and to
emerge roughly in the direction we wanted to go. Hopefully. Unless Skippy got distracted by
something shiny, or the battle with the Outsider inspired him to write a country song about it.
“Ruh roh, Dudes,” Bilby sighed. “That destroyer jumped again.”
Leaning toward Reed, I started to say, “We shouldn’t try to-”
“I know,” she acknowledged with a nod. Of course she understood the situation. Clearing her
throat, she announced, “We are staying right here.”
Technically, Valkyrie was coasting through empty space just under three hundred kilometers per
second, on a path that would eventually arc us on a lazy circle around the center of the Milky Way, an
orbit that would take about two hundred million years. Everyone knew what she meant. The ship would
not be accelerating or changing course, or doing anything that might attract attention. The destroyer
searching for us might have performed a micro jump to whack another mole. Or, it could have jumped
a few lightminutes away, hoping we would foolishly assume it had left the area and drop our stealth
field. In that case, we should not engage our engines. The faster the ship traveled relative to the
interstellar dust and gas around us, the trail we left would grow hotter as particles collided with the
exposed hull.
And the damaged armor was itself flaking away, leaving a trail even more dense. Our moles had
lured the enemy ship away from Valkyrie and from the cloud of dust, soot, and broken parts that
surrounded the ship, but if that destroyer got a sniff of burnt armor particles, it would find us quickly.
It was a gamble. If the destroyer was hoping we would make a move that might expose our11
position, our best bet was to do nothing. But, if instead that destroyer’s captain had realized we were
playing games, that ship could have jumped back to contact the remnants of its task force. In that case,
we should step on the gas and get as far away from our previous position as we could.
Nah, running away really wasn’t an option. The normal space reactionless engines apparently
could run at no more than seven percent thrust without shaking apart. We had to wait. And pray that
destroyer’s captain wasn’t certain there was a real contact in the area.
After another three minutes when Bilby hadn’t detected an inbound jump signature nearby, I had a
bad feeling, and shared a look with Reed.
We were fucked. The destroyer had jumped away to bring back to big dogs.
“Bilby,” Reed talked to the slacker avatar, though of course Bilby was actually all around us.
“Please tell me Skippy is doing a Mister Scott act, and the jump drive will actually be ready before the
time showing on the display.”
“Ooh, sorry, no can do. That estimate is solid. The physical work is almost done, but the coils
aren’t set up to work together yet. Between you and me,” he said to a compartment full of people
“Skippy might have been a bit aggressive on that estimate.”
“This,” Reed whispered to me, our heads almost touching, “would be a great time for one of your
crazy ideas, Sir.”
“I am fresh out of crazy ideas. Sorry.”
She bit her lower lip. Like I said, we were fucked. Out of options. The ship couldn’t run, couldn’t
jump, couldn’t shoot, couldn’t protect itself.
“Maybe,” I whispered, “that destroyer is only a few lightminutes away, and our beat-up sensors
can’t detect the gamma ray burst.”
“Have we ever been that lucky?”
“Uh, no,” I had to admit.
Twelve minutes later, our lack of good luck was confirmed, when the main display lit up. Ships
were jumping in all around us. Bilby identified each ship as the data slowly crawled toward us at the
speed of light. “Seventeen ships. Eighteen,” he adjusted the count. “Maxohlx warships. Mostly cruisers
and destroyers.”
The display was showing icons for each ship, there was only a single heavy cruiser mixed in with
the escort vessels. That made sense. Before we launched Elder weapons, the enemy’s major combatants12
like battleships were deployed close to the Sentinel activation site, with cruiser and destroyers in a
sphere farther away as a screen. Those lighter ships were the only survivors.
“Skippy?” I called out. “Talk to me, Skippy.”
“Busy, Joe,” he snapped.
“We need a miracle here.”
“I’m working on it. Other than fixing our jump drive in the only way I know how to, I got nothin’.”
“Right. Keep doing that.” Badgering him wasn’t going to accomplish anything.
The display lit up like a Christmas tree, bright lights everywhere. All the enemy ships were
saturating the area with active sensors pulses, hammering away to burn through our stealth.
“That hast ping was a hard return,” Bilby groaned. “They know where we are.”
That was the perfect time for a truly inspired Joe Bishop monkey brain idea.
And, I had nothin’.
“We can’t,” I whispered to Reed as I ran an index finger over a cover on the arm rest, the one for
the self-destruct system. The eight digit keypad under that cover wasn’t usually necessary, Bilby or
Skippy could activate the nukes in one of Valkyrie’s magazines at the heart of the ship, all they needed
was the proper voice authorization from two command officers, such as myself and Colonel Reed.
Really, Skippy didn’t even need that protocol, I could just ask him to pop off the nukes. Taking a
breath, I finished my thought. “We can’t let this ship be captured.”
“We can’t let Skippy be captured,” she corrected me, as she flipped up another cover. The one that
could activate an ejection system for the beer can. Back before I gave up command of Valkyrie, the
ejection system had been set up to simply shoot his escape pod mancave away from the ship. The
escape pod had its own stealth field, and of course Skippy could conceal himself. He could do that,
unless he was operating at less than full Magnificence, which was likely in most situations when he
might have to be ejected. The new system was still built around his mancave, but inside the ship there
was now a railgun pointed at that escape pod, along with six hyperspeed missiles in a ring around the
railgun barrel. To eject him, the railgun would launch a blunt slug that would vaporize the escape pod,
and slam Skippy’s canister into space, with him surrounded by six missile decoys that would flood the
area with electronic jamming before they exploded their nuclear warheads. I thought the new system
was cool and OK yes, it was a bit of overkill. In a situation where Valkyrie was trapped by a senior
species fleet, that ejection system could be considered underkill.
“Skippy first,” I agreed, “then the kitties will want me. I can’t let that happen either. If the Maxohlx13
want to- Huh.”
“What?” Reed asked.
“Why aren’t they shooting? Bilby, what are they”
“Dude, the enemy ships are extending damping fields.”
The display began to show a spiderweb of overlapping fields, encroaching on our position. Around
Valkyrie, the field was dim and green, showing the damping strength wasn’t sufficient to prevent us
from jumping away. Not yet. The yellow area of the field was rapidly growing inward. By the time
Skippy got the drive fixed, we wouldn’t be able to jump.
“Why are-”
“They don’t know our drive is busted,” Reed answered my question.
“We’ve got that going for us, then.” We were officially screwed, though I didn’t say that aloud. By
the time Skippy got the drive fixed, the ship down off the lift and pumped up the tires, the enemy’s
overlapping damping fields would render us unable to jump.
Reed looked at me, then down at the control panel on the left arm rest of her chair.
I interpreted her expression as ‘we should just get this over with’?
She wasn’t angry with me, she didn’t even look disappointed.
That made me angry and disappointed with myself, damn it.
Fuck it, she was right. There was no point dragging out the inevitable, so-
“Another group of ships are showing up to the party!” Bilby warned. “This is heinous, we- Whoo-
hoo!”
“What?” Reed did not appreciate the AIs commentary, she wanted facts.
“The second group of ships are ours!”
Four seconds later, due to lightspeed time lag, we heard a familiar voice. “This is Admiral Sousa of
the United Nations 3rd Fleet, calling the Maxohlx commander. I have eight battleships with me, my
sensors show you have none. Unless you are extremely bad at math, or just stupid, I suggest you depart
the area.”
The Maxohlx are arrogant, aggressive assholes, they also are not stupid. Without making any reply,
the enemy ships disappeared in faint puffs of gamma radiation.
“Admiral Sousa,” I tensed my shoulders to suppress an involuntary shudder. Coming down off an14
adrenaline surge, I felt chilled. “Your timing is excellent. How did you find us?”
“I’d like to take credit for that,” one side of his mouth curled up in a smile that disappeared
immediately. “But, we didn’t find you.”
“Then how-”
“We outsourced the job.” That time, the smile lingered on his face for a moment.
“Ah,” I knew what he meant. He had tasked some of his ships to shadow the Maxohlx formations,
in case they located Valkyrie. Which they did. “Did you tip them for their service?”
“I allowed them to jump away, so,” he shrugged. “How soon can Valkyrie jump away?”
“It would be better for us to latch onto a star carrier.”
“The enemy will be back, in greater numbers, their pride won’t let them stay out of a fight. If you
get attacked during a latching operation, I will lose two ships.”
“Good point. Give us- The drive will be back online in seven minutes, that’s the best Skippy can
do.”
“We can’t expect another miracle?”
“Hey!” The beer can protested. “Getting this thing online at all is a freakin’ miracle. It will be
another miracle if it doesn’t explode.”
“Skippy, you have me so bursting with confidence, I have to unbutton my shirt.”
“Oh, shut up. The drive will work fine for one jump, then it needs a vacation. Now, go away and let
me work, unless you plan to fix this thing.”
