Hunting Dog Read online

  “Did any of them manage to get a message out?” I asked Shelby.

  “Unknown Admiral. There is too much atmospheric interference to be sure,” my second in command answered.

  I had suspected as much, so I was not surprised.

  The door to the turbo-lift swished open, and Whiskers stepped onto the bridge. He looked like a horse who had been ridden hard and put away wet. I knew that he and his team had been burning midnight oil to get the ship put back together.

  It seemed strange to me that construction bots could build the entire ship by themselves from nothing more than lunar regolith and yet when it came to repairing the beast in bad weather the bots were next to useless.

  Whiskers and Sa’Mi had rigged up some enhanced, armored EVA suits using Marine Encounter Suits as their starting point. Rather than weapons systems, the new suits had plasma torches and nanobot-riveters. With these suits, teams of J’ni and human engineers could replace the portions of the exterior skin of the Gilboa II that had been ruptured. This skin was essential for placement of sundry items like shield emitters and exterior sensors. All good things to have if you are fighting a war.

  The problem was these suits were designed by the ‘let’s get it done quickly’ school of engineering and did not include many of the creature comforts that one might expect in a more polished design. They were what I tended to call a ‘dancing dog’ engineering project. You clapped because the dog danced… not because it danced well.

  “You don’t look happy,” I said with a raised eyebrow.

  The two men, one human, and the other J’ni, stepped down to my command chair.

  “Aye, is not dat we’re unhappy. Its dat we’re a wee bit nackered. I got da last a me boys in just a few minutes ago. T’aint pretty but ya got yerself a full set a shields.”

  That was good news.

  “We just took out six reconnaissance crafts. It’s a good bet they know we are here. Is our escape hatch deployable yet?” I asked.

  Sa’Mi answered. He was using a voice that belonged to a cartoon character know as Sponge Bob. I refused to react because I did not want to encourage him. Seriously, I would have preferred the Marilyn Monroe he had been using earlier.

  “If you mean our decoy, then yes Admiral it is ready to deploy. With an optimal flight path, it can be on station in sixteen hours.”

  I looked up from the data pad I had been skimming.

  “Sixteen hours? How in the hell can you get it there that fast? It’s taken us almost a week to move as far from the magnetic pole as we have. How can you get the decoy back that fast?”

  Whiskers smiled.

  “My wee little furry friend here asked a very good question while we were banging together our little surprise. Why da we need ta make it airtight he says? And…”

  “And… If it doesn’t have to worry about atmospheric pressure, it can fly in a straight line through the atmosphere and not follow a curved path like we do,” I finished.

  “Aye, and it also has a much better power to mass ratio. The wee lit’l bugger has go’ a lot of git-up and go fer a ship its size. Between the two of them, our little darl’n can get where it needs ta be a darn sight faster than we can.”

  “Good job, boys,” I acknowledged with a tip of an imaginary hat. “Coordinate with Commander Shelby, but get that boat launched as soon as possible. If I were the Defiler commander, I’d have every ship in system heading our way.”

  I hate it when I’m right.

  ***

  “How many are up there?” I asked a day later.

  It seemed the Defilers had moved a number of ships that had been patrolling the Sol system into orbit around Jupiter. The planet was being bombarded with antimatter bombs. The only saving grace was that Jupiter was a massive planet, and it would take tens of millions of such devices to effectively blanket the planet.

  Mitty looked up from the sensor station he was manning. “As far as I can tell Admiral, every last one of them.”

  I tapped my comms.

  “Engineering. How long before you are ready to execute?”

  Whiskers responded immediately. “Ya give the word Admiral, and we’ll give ya 160% on all reactors fer as long as we can. I cannae guarantee we can keep it up for long, but we’ll give you what we can.”

  “You just get us to a minimal jump distance, and I’ll handle the rest.”

  I hit my comms a second time.

  “Attention crew of the Gilboa II. We are about to run the gauntlet. The ride is guaranteed to be a bumpy one. We’ve run countless drills, but no one has ever done what we’re about to attempt. I need you to remain sharp, and I need you to stay focused. Riker out.

  “Commander Shelby, begin a two-minute countdown. Mitty, coordinate with engineering. Aft shields to maximum.

  “Commander Jowls, start our diversion please.”

  Jowls leaned forward and manipulated the small holographic display in front of him. With a flick of a dexterous front paw, he tossed a visual display of our decoy onto the main view screen where it settled into the lower right corner. This was the small ship we had launched a day ago.

  It had settled into a holding pattern about a thousand kilometers off the northern magnetic pole. A series of small drones attended it like handmaidens for a queen. They flew about twenty klicks away from the decoy, which meant they had a ring-side seat for the fireworks. They shared their view with us.

  Wait for it… wait for it, I whispered to myself. Finally, the enemy cooperated. A large explosion from depth charge signaled the start of our show. What followed was impressive.

  “There she goes,” Jowls barked between slimy slurps.

  The decoy expanded its shields four thousand percent. It now appeared to be roughly the size of the Gilboa II. At the same time, the drones began to emit dirty randomized EM signals. It was like putting a spinner on the end of a fishing line. The flashes were intended to grab the attention of the prey. It worked as expected. Based on the number and frequency of exploding depth charges making their way towards our ‘bait,’ the Defiler fleet was converging on what was ultimately going to be a very disappointing target.

  I leaned back in my chair and braced myself.

  “Punch it, Mitty.”

  There was a slight tremor in the deck, but that was the extent of what we felt, despite the maelstrom that we were creating. Thousands of marble-sized beads of plutonium were being fired out the aft end of the Gilboa II. As they sped away from us, they were struck by a powerful antiproton pulse.

  Atoms are mostly empty space. Even the highly compressed atmosphere of Jupiter is mostly empty space when you start working at the scale of a proton (or anti-proton as the case may be.) Plutonium is considerably denser than the surrounding atmosphere. The chances of an anti-proton striking the center of a plutonium atom was vanishingly small, but it was still orders-of-magnitude greater than hitting the center of a hydrogen or helium molecule.

  There was a big difference, however between plutonium interacting with the antiprotons and the Jupiter’s atmosphere interacting with the antiprotons. In plutonium, the antiprotons catalyzed a fission cascade releasing energy in the form of a miniature nuclear bomb. Normally, you would need something on the order of 12 kilograms of plutonium to reach critical mass. The antiproton catalyzed reaction required only about a gram.

  Thousands of these little bombs exploded behind the Gilboa II, pushing against her shields and accelerating her up and out of the atmosphere.

  Thanks to the prodigious number of Defiler depth charges going off around the planet, the noise our little nuclear pulse drive was making should remain undetected. At least that was the plan. Turns out lady luck was taking a powder. No sooner had we breached the densest part of the Jovian atmosphere then we had four Defiler battleships vectoring towards our position.

  “Engineering, the word is given. I need those VASMRs throttled up way past the red line. Push them for everything they’ve got. Whiskers, don’t leave anything in the tank.”

>   2100.1289.8830 Galactic Normalized Time

  RC182 sat strapped to a chair in a small windowless room. He had been in the chair for the better part of four days. It’s surprising how uncomfortable that chair had become. His captors had somehow neutralized his suicide implant. This meant he was forced to endure until he was freed, or his captors tired of asking him the same questions again and again.

  They wanted to know the location of his master’s homeworld. He had told them the first time they had asked. As a clone with a termination implant installed at the completion of primary gestation, there was no need to provide counter-interrogation training. As a result of that… and of having no vested interest in the outcome of their current campaign, RC182 had seen no reason not to answer.

  The problem was his captors did not believe he would surrender such intel without a protracted interrogation. That was unfortunate because he really would like to get out of that chair.

  Chapter 13: Lost Dog…

  “Twenty thousand kilometers and closing,” Shelby reported.

  “Revector the shields,” I barked. “Mitty, run the numbers. How soon can we jump?”

  “We are still too deep within the gravity well. A jump would be unwise. We need another ten minutes,” the Archon replied calmly.

  “Fifteen thousand kilometers. The lead ship is entering weapons range… and they are firing,” Shelby added just as calmly.

  “Return fire. Full spread.” I turned back to towards Mitty. “We don’t have ten minutes. What happens if we try to jump this deep in the gravity well?”

  “The shearing forces would be extreme. We may take some damage as a result. The biggest problem will be our emergence point. It will almost assuredly be near a comparable or larger gravity well.”

  The bridge shook again. We were taking hits from three separate directions now. The shields were draining fast. If this had been the original Gilboa II, we’d have been toast already.

  “Two more attackers are entering firing range. They are directly in our path,” Shelby announced.

  Damn, I thought to myself. Positioning themselves directly in our path presented two problems. First, we would be heading straight into the lion’s den, and second, their kinetics would serve to erode our forward velocity and therefore, how fast we moved out of the big planet’s gravity well.

  To make matters worse, if Mitty was right, and I had no reason to doubt him, we would no control of where we would emerge from a Skip jump. I might well need whatever shields I had left to survive the emergence point. That singular concern forced my decision.

  “All hands, this is the Admiral. Prepare for emergency jump. Mitty, I need you and Gil to handle this one. Jump when ready and take whatever actions you deem fit when we emerge. Do not wait for my order.”

  “Aye Aye Admiral. Jumping now.”

  Permit me to share with you a valuable insight. If you are ever offered the chance to voluntarily enter Skip Space from deep within a gravity well… decline the offer. It is a miserable experience. My gut twisted inside. I felt like I had eaten day-old convenience store sushi and was paying the price. Judging from the number of green faces on the bridge, I gathered my experience was not a unique one.

  Rather than the usual smooth entry into that strange extra-dimensional realm, our transition was punctuated with the sound of straining metal and circuits shorting out. That is never a good sign.

  This was the shearing issue I had been warned about. The deal was this… the ship was not entering Skip Space as one unit but instead had partially entered with the remainder of the ship being physically pulled in. These types of stresses were not something the designers had planned for in their initial design of the Gilboa.

  Again, I was impressed with the Jabesh AI Arty and the enhancements he had baked into our new ship.

  What felt like about year and a half later (more likely thirty seconds), we emerged from Skip Space. You’ve heard the expression ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’? I have a new personal appreciation for it.

  “Solar mass dead ahead!” Shelby yelled.

  When she said, ‘dead ahead,’ what she really meant was ‘entering the corona now!’

  I ran some quick calculations in my head. That was the advantage of having an alien-enhanced IQ of about 180. I didn’t like where the numbers were leading me. We were moving too fast, and our position was completely wrong to attempt the kind of slingshot orbit that would allow us to break free of the star’s gravitational grip. A Skip jump was absolutely out of the question. Our shields had already taken a beating. They would not last long. We seemed to be between the proverbial ‘rock and hot place.’

  All this took me only a handful of seconds to realize. That meant I had plenty of time to think about other things.

  Now, you need to understand, my mind is a strange place to live. I own this and accept it as normal… at least for me. My ship was being dragged down into a star by a couple of things: the star’s immense gravitational field and our unfortunate proximity to said star. In point of fact, the ship was in imminent danger of being burned to a crisp.

  This is the type of thing that would be somewhat concerning for most commanders… and in fairness, somewhere in the deeper recesses of my mind, I’m sure there was a little ‘mini-me’ running around saying, ‘We should do something about this!’

  Rather than panicking, however, I found myself fascinated by what I was seeing… from a purely scientific perspective. I immediately began to catalog in my mind what I knew about a star’s corona. Somewhere in that mishmash of seemingly random data, there was a solution to our current dilemma.

  The corona is the outer atmosphere of a star. These gases are more of a plasma. Translation, they are bloody hot, typically reaching temperatures greater than a million degrees Celsius. At these high temperatures, both hydrogen and helium are stripped of their electrons. Even minor elements like carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen are stripped down to bare nuclei. Only the heavier elements, things like iron, are able to retain a few of their electrons.

  The thickness of the corona of a star is highly variable. In some ways, that was a good thing for us. The Gilboa II was just entering the outer fringes of one of the thickest parts of whatever star we were visiting.

  Our Higgs Field inhibitor was working overtime to reduce our effective mass. This meant the solar wind against our shields served to slow our rate of descent. Still, the gravitational field of this particular star seemed to be about thirty-four gravities, which meant it was a tad bigger than Earth’s Sol.

  That gravity meant a guy my size would weigh almost seven thousand pounds if I could somehow stand on the surface of this sun.

  The intense magnetic field-lines whipped the corona’s charged plasma about with enough force to create vortexes and coronal mass ejections. It was this last that was of interest to me.

  Generally speaking, coronal mass ejection sites are some of those places only the foolish dare tread. Some of the ones created by good old Sol can travel fast enough to reach the Earth in as little as thirteen hours. They’re composed of billions of tons of charged particles. The ejections themselves last for several hours.

  If you can imagine a dragon spewing out flames, you have a good idea about what these CMEs look like. As I said, the site of a CME was a place only fools dare venture… and yet that’s exactly where I was looking to go.

  Mitty and the ship’s AI were valiantly applying reverse thrusters. It was about as effective as a horsefly trying to push an elephant, but I gave them points for trying. In point of fact, I suspected the ship’s AI was using the counter-thrust to help defect the stream of charged particles slamming against our heavily abused shields.

  “Scan the sun’s surface,” I barked. “Find me a CM ejection point. Something we can reach.”

  Before any of them could acknowledge my order, I hit the comms for engineering.

  “Whiskers, you got your ears on? Have you been monitoring the bridge?”

  “Aye, Dog, I have. T
ell me yer not planning wot I think yer planning?”

  “Sadly, my friend, I probably am. I’m going to need as much shielding as I can get, and I’m going to need it sooner rather than later.”

  There was a brief pause before my chief engineer responded.

  “The forward shields are under a wee bit of a strain right now. I’ll do what I can to firm up the aft shield emitters. I’d recommend rotating the ship to hit yer ejection point using those shields. It may not be enough, but it’s the best I can give ya.”

  “Do what you can, Commander. Riker out.”

  Every face on the bridge had turned in my direction.

  “Anybody feel like doing something exciting?”

  ***

  Almost six minutes later, we found what we needed. A small CME had formed a few minutes earlier about a thousand klicks from our current descent path. In the grand scheme of things, we were practically right on top of it.

  I had been circling the bridge like a shark looking for its next meal. Something about waiting with no control over when and where we were going to find our opportunity to exit this pop-stand put me on edge.

  I took two steps over to my command chair and hit I hit the comms.

  “Attention crew. Transfer your stations to interior terminals and move away from any exterior bulkheads. We are about to kiss the dragon, and it promises to be a rough ride.”

  I walked once more in a slow circle around the bridge. I nodded every now and then. It wasn’t that I needed to inspect everyone’s station. It was more of a way to assure my team that I had confidence in them.

  I had Mitty take over the helm. It wasn’t that Lieutenants Heinz and Daniels weren’t capable, but rather that Mitty’s cybernetic systems gave him a fraction of a second edge in response-time. That fraction of a second could very well mean life or death.