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  The deception would continue to work until a lucky shot actually hit the probe… at which point it would die an honorable death have fulfilled its purpose. Another of the cloaked decoys would then take up the mantle of Defiler deception.

  The bad guys would know they were engaged in a high-tech version of whack-a-mole, but there would be little they could do but continue to attack.

  In short order, the thirty beams became one-hundred and then six-hundred. All too soon that dreaded first lucky shot occurred, and the decoy was destroyed.

  I was sad to see it go. I had found myself rooting for it as it simulated attack after attack being fended off. It had to be driving the Defiler commanders nuts. For whatever reason, I found that thought appealing.

  “Commander Shelby, would you be good enough to bring decoys two and three online.”

  “Aye Admiral. Gracie and George coming online now.”

  “You named your toys, Gracie and George?” Lori said from behind me.

  I turned and winked. I hadn’t realized she was on the bridge.

  “I thought it was the least I could do, Doctor. They ‘are’ fighting and dying for us. They are semi-sentient AIs,” the commander answered with a shrug.

  I couldn’t tell if she was serious or not… but given my own feelings about the demise of number one, I decided she might very well be. A good three-fourths of the Defiler armada were now within weapons range. It was time for surprise number two.

  “Mister Jowls if you would be so kind as to become an irritant for our friends out there, I would be most grateful.”

  The Roharian emissary, who had essentially assigned himself as my permanent weapons officer, drooled on his console and began an elaborate series of highly coordinated operations. In many ways, he looked like a maestro conducting a symphony.

  Each of the remaining decoy drones was fitted with a single neutronium-tipped hypervelocity missile as well as two single-shot, nuclear-pumped anti-proton beam weapons. The key was to fire the missiles and energy beams so they would arrive at their respective destinations simultaneously.

  The situation was complicated by the need to eject the nuclear-pumped weapons early so that when they went bang… they didn’t take the decoy out in the process.

  I watched as Gracie and George coordinated their fire on the lead ship. The second neutronium-tipped missile slammed into the ship’s shields about a tenth of a second behind the first. The shield was still regenerating after the first missile and energy weapons had drained it. The resulting explosion was impressive.

  One down. About a thousand to go, I thought.

  Drawing first blood appeared to have pissed off our adversary. Rather than splitting their attention between our two active decoys, they began to focus all of their attention on one. It wasn’t but a moment later when the decoy was neutralized.

  “Goodnight Gracie,” I heard Shelby mutter softly. In a few seconds, George joined her.

  Over the next fifteen minutes, we lost ten more decoys… starting with Bert and Ernie and ending with Sigmund and Freud. In the process, we took out six more Defiler ships. It was a start, but it would not be nearly enough.

  Giving the bad guys a bloody nose was good for morale but the disparity in numbers between our forces was so great it was like a mouse give the finger to the hawk that was about to eat it. It might make the mouse feel better, but at the end of the day, the mouse was still a quick lunch.

  The Yorktown started harassing the enemy with their own decoys at about the same time. While the decoys were about as effective as ours, the risk to the Yorktown was far greater.

  The Defiler armada was actively scanning the zone of engagement with powerful sensor sweeps. Neither the Yorktown nor the Ticonderoga had the type of adaptive cloaking that the Gilboa II had access to. In short, whereas the Gilboa II had managed to stay hidden, the Yorktown was spotted and targeted almost immediately.

  Only Captain Tilly’s quick decision to fire off every one of the weapons at once saved the tough little ship. Even so, as the Yorktown pulled away from the engagement, she was bleeding atmosphere and leaking highly energetic plasma from three of her four exhaust manifolds. If the Armada decided to pursue her, there would be little anybody could do.

  “Mister Jowls, I believe it is time for phase two. Please coordinate with the Ticonderoga and begin our run.”

  After a slimy slurp to clear his mouth, the Roharian responded with an affirmative.

  Moments later the Ticonderoga appeared to decloak. When I say ‘appeared,’ what I mean to say is the ship that decloaked looked to be the Gilboa II. At precisely the same moment, the real Gilboa II also decloaked.

  “Flush all launch tubes and fire main batteries!” I barked. “Cycle and repeat until I say stop.”

  I felt the softest of shudders as the hyper-massive neutronium-tipped missiles were thrown out of the linear accelerators that served as their launch tubes. Higgs field generators built into the missiles, as well as the launch tubes, suppressed their actual mass until they were far enough away from the ship to avoid damaging it with their gravity wake.

  “The Ticonderoga is flushing her tubes as well,” Commander Shelby reported.

  “Return fire incoming!” Ensign Carstairs added.

  “Who are they firing at?” I asked calmly. Our shields flared and began to drain almost immediately, so I knew we were one of the targets. What I needed to know was the Defiler armada taking our bait?

  As if to answer my question, the bridge shook violently.

  “Admiral, the enemy launched a brief volley at the Ticonderoga and now is focusing on us.”

  “Damage report,” I barked over the din of emergency klaxons.

  “Shields are down to fifty-eight percent and struggling to regenerate,” Shelby answered quickly.

  “Cease fire and begin evasive maneuvers. Work our way towards our little surprise… be casual about it. We don’t want the lambs to know they are being led to the slaughter.”

  “Roger that, sir. Casual as she goes,” Lieutenant Daniels answered from the helm. He and his partner at navigation, Sandy Heinz began to work the ship in a zig-zag pattern that moved us ever closer to the field of cloaked mines we had laid down earlier.

  These particular mines were not designed to explode. They generated a powerful but completely sensor-transparent Higgs field that would increase the effective mass of anything within range. If everything went according to plan, we were about to give a sizeable number of the bad guys a very bad day.

  I hit the comm button on my chair. It was time to engage in some theatrics.

  “Commander McGraw, are you ready to put on a little dog and pony show for our guests of honor?”

  “Aye, dat I am Admiral. Would ya like me ta begin?”

  “Aye, dat I would,” I answered in my admittedly very poor imitation of his Scottish brogue.

  Immediately an EMP detonated against a heavily shielded section of the hull. It would have no impact on ship operations but any Defilers watching… and there were hundreds… would see what appeared to be a serious malfunction. To help sell the act, Whiskers immediately began purging plasma from the nearest manifold. Toss in a little erratic wobbling, and you had a very convincing ‘whoops’ of the technological failure variety.

  “Mister Jowls, if you would be so kind as to leave our friends some parting gifts, I would again be most appreciative.”

  A couple of wet slurps later the Roharian emissary-turned-weapons-officer had deployed three very special, heavily-shielded and cloaked neutronium gravity mines from a missile port near the simulated failure site. At the same time, various pieces of scrap metal, organic material, and water were also released from an adjoining airlock.

  “Parting gifts away Admiral,” Jowls reported while cleaning up his slobber.

  As a side note for those that are interested in such things, the Roharian had the ability to control his excessive drooling but tended to forget when he got excited. Based on the amount of cleanup required
, I was guessing he was very excited.

  It’s a nice thing to see people enjoy their work.

  2100.1289.8817 Galactic Normalized Time

  The local presence of the Eshbaal cabal surveyed the initial results of the armada’s foray into the Sol system. The defenders had acquitted themselves well. If the Eshbaal cabal had been capable of irritation… it would be. Its fleet had seen some twenty of its members destroyed and another dozen temporarily disabled. All while inflicting minimal damage on the defenders.

  In the end, it would not matter though. Humanity in the Sol system would be subjugated, and the encoded DNA archive so essential to the Mahanaim resurrection recovered and decoded.

  Chapter 9: Tricky Dog…

  The lights on the bridge flickered briefly as Engineering diverted more power to the shields. The amount of energy the Gilboa II was deflecting boggled the mind. I had already ordered the ship to begin a rapid spin on its axis to spread the enemy fire as evenly as possible between the shield emitters. This was an effort to avoid burning them out under the onslaught from the hundreds Defiler battleships using us for target practice.

  I suppose I should have been honored that they thought so much of me that they were devoting a full third of their fleet towards dealing with the Gilboa II problem.

  In a way, I was thankful. Our recently installed, ancestor-enhanced shielding was almost an order of magnitude more capable than what either the Yorktown or Ticonderoga had in terms of protection.

  “How close are we to letting our friends out there know how much we care,” I asked as the ship shook with an exceptionally strong jolt.

  We were flying through the extreme outer edge of Jupiter’s gravity well. Our flyby was just inside the orbit of Calisto at about one point five million kilometers. To be clear, our flight path was no accident. We had weaved and woven in a complex three-dimensional pattern, ostensibly to avoid weapons-fire, but in reality… to get us to this place… at this time.

  The gravity of Jupiter would alter our course just enough to swing us into a collision course with Jupiter’s second largest moon. Of course, we would use thrusters to avoid said collision. Our pursuers would be forced to do the same thing. That’s when the fun would begin.

  “Our cloaked gravity mines have acquired locks on their respective targets. Going active in sixteen seconds. We’ve cleared the Higgs field net we deployed earlier. It will go active in thirteen minutes,” Shelby answered.

  “From then on, it just a matter of Newtonian physics,” I said with a smile.

  Swiveling my command chair, I glanced in Mitty’s general direction. The Archon was working sensors.

  “Bring up a split view on the main screen. Give me the armada on the right and our forward flight path on the left.”

  “Aye Admiral. Reconfiguring the display now,” the little alien otter responded in that oddly deep voice of his.

  As soon as the gravity weapons went active, they began to send out dozens of intense tractor beams that rapidly pulled the evenly spaced portion of the armada that was chasing us into a tighter cluster. The three devices we had deployed must have been having an effect because the rate of weapons fire aimed in our general direction fell off precipitously. Undoubtedly the crew onboard those vessels were attempting to address a sudden and unexpected course change.

  As the mean distance between ships in the Defiler fleet fell from two thousand kilometers to under five hundred in less than ten minutes, the Gilboa II’s enhanced sensors began to see wild gyrations within the armada as they attempted to increase the separation between ships.

  The problem was, as they moved away from one ship, they inevitably moved closer to another. Since it was the ships on the fringes that were the targets of our tractor beams, it was as if the enemy was caught within a box that was growing ever smaller. What they failed to appreciate was that the best was yet to come.

  “Armada is entering optimum range of our Higgs network,” Mitty reported from his sensor station.

  “Energize the net,” I said quietly.

  The Higgs boson, or more specifically its interaction with the Higgs field, is what is responsible for giving something its mass. The more mass, the more momentum. The more momentum, the more energy required to change direction.

  When the second part of our little surprise activated, everything within the net found itself weighing about a thousand times more than it did moments before. The bad guys now had one of those hard choices to make. Do they fight to keep from colliding with each other or do they fight to change course, so they could avoid hitting Calisto at a sizeable fraction of the speed of light?

  The bottom line was long before they could figure out what to do, the laws of physics made the problem moot. In a fitting reenactment of the bogey-four event, fully a third of the Defiler fleet plowed into the icy moon at almost ten percent the speed of light.

  It was impressive. Calisto is virtually the same size as the planet Mercury but only about thirty to thirty-five percent of its mass. With a significant amount of frozen ices covering its surface, an energic impact, such as the one we had just engineered, resulted in the instantaneous conversion of much of that surface ice into gas. For a brief period, the solar system’s third-largest moon would have one of the thickest atmospheres of any moon.

  Sadly, the bad guys were not in the mood to allow me to enjoy the fruits of my labor.

  “Ah… Admiral,” Commander Robison said from the situation board located in the rear of the bridge. The CAG had been tracking the broader theater since the battle began. I needed someone to keep an eye on those ships in the armada that had refused my party invitation. He was the perfect man for the job. Sadly, I had a feeling I knew what he was going to say.

  “Let me guess Commander… we’ve piqued their interest, and we have some more ships coming our way. How many?”

  “All of them, sir. The entire fleet just began a course change that should bring them into weapons range in just under twenty minutes.”

  That got my attention.

  “How in the hell are they pulling that off? At the speed they are traveling it should take them that long just to adjust their vector. They are doing that plus backtracking to our position.”

  Mitty stepped forward.

  “It appears, Admiral, that the larger of the dreadnoughts escorting the Defiler fleet is capable of generating its own massive Higgs Field dampener. It simply flew past each of the groups of ships in the armada and reduced their effective mass long enough for them to rapidly adjust their heading without having to overcome their initial inertia.”

  That was a bit of bad news for the home team. The enemy AI controlled a vastly larger fleet of ships that were generally superior to human or Galactic Order technology. The one exception had been the Gilboa II and its Ancestor-enhanced systems. It seemed the Defilers had a ‘super ship’ of their own.

  “Signal the Yorktown and Ticonderoga. They are to make the jump to Wolf 359 immediately,” I ordered.

  I looked over towards Mitty and Shelby.

  “We’ve still got a few tricks up our sleeves… and we have about five minutes to put them into play.”

  “What do you have in mind, sir,” Shelby asked.

  I smiled. “You up for a game of hide and seek?”

  ***

  The fully cloaked Gilboa II settled gently into the thickly clouded Calisto atmosphere. We grounded the ship near some of the Defiler wreckage that littered the surface. Cloaked and shrouded in the maelstrom that covered the small planetoid, we were hoping we could remain undetected… at least until it was too late for our hapless adversaries to escape the special surprise we had in store for them.

  It had been the busiest five minutes of my life. but we got everything in place for, what I suspected would be, my final chance to hit the armada where it hurt.

  While the Gilboa nestled herself on Calisto’s surface, two modified probes floated in the space between the moon and Jupiter. At exactly the right time, both went active. One be
gan emitting a massive holographic image of the Gilboa II, along with a nearly-perfect simulated energy signature matching my ship.

  With luck, the enemy would see what they expected to see and start taking potshots at our ghost. It was a trick we had used before. I suspected the ruse would not last for more than a few seconds. In point of fact, I was counting on it being detected.

  Now you may be asking yourself, ‘Self… why would the Dog want his ruse discovered?’ The answer is simple. This is a tricky dog.

  The second probe dove into the upper layers of the Jupiter’s atmosphere. It also began emitting a fake energy signature. This one was intended to simulate an imperfectly cloaked ship attempting to hide within the dense clouds of the massive planet.

  Field emitters on the second probe forced a Gilboa II-sized pocket of vacuum to move through the dense atmosphere. Such an anomaly would normally not be detected. That is, of course, unless you happened to be in the neighborhood and looking for a Gilboa II-sized ship… hiding.

  It’s a well-known fact that people tend to see what they expect to see. Magicians have used such sleight-of-hand techniques to fool appreciative audiences since humanity had first learned to say ‘Wow.’

  I had a suspicious feeling that if things went according to plan, this audience would not be as appreciative.

  Unfortunately, as is often the case, not everything always works according to plan. In a few minutes, this sad reality would become abundantly clear.

  “Admiral the first ships are entering weapons range,” Shelby reported.

  “Very good Commander. Instruct Probe-1 to begin simulation Alpha One.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  Alpha One was an evasive pattern designed avoid weapons fire. At first, everything went smoothly. Sixteen of the armada’s battleships entered Jovian orbit and began to fire at our decoy. The probe which was acting as the decoy was obliged to simulate hits on a powerful shield.