The Jupiter War Read online

  “No way, Jose,” Margaret swore, shaking a chubby fist at the distant enemy. How did they find me, she wondered. Margaret glanced over to the stealth electronics panel. It was still functional. She sucked her teeth in consternation.

  “Oh my god, they’ve countered to our stealth gear!”

  This information was probably worth as much to the navy as a working MAM engine was to the enemy. The computer still had not responded. Margaret checked its panel and found that the main unit had been destroyed in the second attack. She frowned, fingers poised above the destruct switch for the stealth electronics—if she was wrong, she was destroying her only chance—and pressed. The panel glowed brighter and then went dark.

  Committed, Margaret switched her attention to the engines. The panel showed that the starboard main engine was scrap. Maggie’s fingers moved quickly to stop the hemorrhaging of valuable fuel, a loss which had made Dasher’s course an erratic heloid and probably had saved her from being further assaulted or boarded by the enemy.

  The left engine was functional at reduced power, but Dasher relied on the twin thrust of the left and right engines. Using only one engine would put the Dasher into fast right turn. Attitude-control thrusters could counter some of this. Maggie gave a gargled groan when she noted that the attitude Control System was so much junk. Either the enemy had been incredibly lucky or it had known just where it hit Dasher to immobilize her. Margaret decided that it was not luck. But it hadn’t gone all their way: Dasher’s roll about its long axis meant that she could thrust the left engine by itself and wobble in a path that was mostly forward. She would have to be careful with her motions, though: the laws of energy conservation were such that a roll about the long axis would try to convert itself into a yaw about the center of gravity, just like a top falling over to its side. One of the early Explorer satellites had done just that.

  “Don’t bother checking the com gear,” Margaret told the defunct computer, then shrugged when she realized her mistake. With a dismissive wave she responded to herself: “Doesn’t matter, they probably took out the main antenna and, besides, you don’t have enough power with just one engine to punch a distress call back to Sinope.”

  She reviewed her options: the enemy wanted Dasher intact, Margaret herself would be an added bonus; she had only one engine to use but it was fully functional; Dasher had no armaments, relying on speed and its now-destroyed stealth gear. She was not far from Jupiter.

  Jupiter! “Period, period, what’s this goddamned rotation period?” Maggie chanted to herself. She locked her eyes on a blight star that could have been Amalthea and counted Dasher’s roll rate at three revolutions a minute, more or less. Margaret plotted a thrust that would vector her toward Jupiter.

  “How much can that chamber take?” she asked herself, hoping that as the designer she might know and knowing, as the designer, that she had never bothered to calculate it—Dasher had never been expected to make even one-G thrusts. “Never mind that, Trudeaux! Just get moving!” she ordered.

  Maggie fired the engine manually, the computer being hopeless. She set the matter and antimatter flow rates to produce first one half gee, then one gee and finally, in a mixture of devil-take-all abandon and sheer desperation, five gees. She cut the engines quickly and tried to determine how fast the ship was turning. When she thought it was just about aligned for Jupiter, she thrust again, countering the turning moment. Then, aligned to head toward the huge planet, she started a corkscrew towards the leviathan of the skies.

  “What’s your speed? You’ve got to go faster, Trudeaux, you’ve got to run away from the enemy!” Maggie barked aloud, forcing herself to play hard captain. She was disappointed to admit that she could think of no easy way to calculate Dasher’s speed. Dasher had been on a trajectory designed to swing around Amalthea and back towards Sinope but, as Sinope moved other-clockwise around Jupiter than Amalthea, Margaret and Dasher would have to execute a very fuel-costly direction reversal that few chemically fueled ships could do—one of the reasons that the navy felt orbits between Amalthea and Sinope were safe. In order to facilitate the maneuver, Dasher’s trajectory was arranged so that the ship would be traveling at the lowest possible velocity when the reversal in direction was made.

  At Perijovian, the lowest point of her orbit, she would have had the same speed as Amalthea—slightly over thirty kilometers a second. To get into a low Jupiter orbit she would need a speed of just over forty-two kilometers per second, a difference of twelve kilometers per second. And she wanted to get to Jupiter fast.

  “Two gees?” Maggie asked herself, taking the time to review the panels in front of her. “Let’s see: t equals delta vee over a; at two gees, nineteen point six-two meters per second squared, delta vee is twelve thousand, t is about, uh”—she glanced nervously about for a working calculator or something that could do simple math and swore when she found nothing. “Call it twenty meters per squared second, that’s six hundred seconds—ten minutes at two gees!” She mulled the figures over.

  “Maybe it’ll shake ’em. It’ll sure give ’em a rough ride!” Her captain voice agreed, adding: “Won’t be too easy on you, either!” Maggie crouched onto the command chair for extra security, set the flow controls, and fired. The enemy were taken by surprise. It was a long thirty seconds before they fired off in pursuit of her.

  Maggie spent the long minutes en route to Jupiter alternating between checking the enemy, pulsing the one engine, watching her fuel, and wracking her brains for a way out of her predicament. Just outside the atmosphere she stopped her two-gravity thrusting, waited a quarter of a corkscrew, and made another thrust, a wrenching, bone-jarring six Gs. She countered it ten seconds later with another agonizing six Gs, Now Dasher was in the pull of Jupiter’s gravity and on a course deep into Jupiter’s clouds.

  “How much pressure can this hull take?” Maggie wondered scientifically, continuing captainly: “Can it take more than they can?”

  Under more normal circumstances Margaret would have addressed these questions to the ship’s computers, but there was no computer to talk to, Then she remembered that the ship was holed—the internal and external pressures would both be Jupiter’s. Her ship could take more pressure than theirs. The question was, could she?

  Switching from the chair’s oxygen to her portable supply, Margaret made her way to the suit locker. With much grumbling she managed to pull her deep space suit over her shipsuit. With it she could take more pressure but would lose dexterity. She returned to the control room and found to her disgust that she could not fit herself into the command chair and was bouncing out instead. Abashed, she remembered that she had to activate her magnetic soles.

  Now she said to herself, the question is, how much can this suit take?

  “One way to find out!” Maggie waited until she figured the good engine was almost above her, fired another four-second burst, counted to six and repeated the operation, plunging Dasher deeper into Jove’s thin air.

  She glanced at the displays: Dasher was ten kilometers inside Jupiter’s atmosphere. The enemy ships were following her with no difficulty: the atmosphere was mostly opaque at this depth. Navy manuals did not take into consideration mad dives into the Jovian atmosphere; it took Maggie quite a while to guess a depth she was willing to risk her life with.

  “Even if you can go lower than them, Maggie, they’ll just wait until you come up for air,” she noted tactically.

  “You’ve got to sucker ’em into letting you get away,” she decided captainly. She thought about it as Jupiter’s atmosphere thickened from tenuous to visible. She forced herself to glance at the hull temperature gauge—it was already edging into the red. Dasher was not supposed to make atmospheric entries—no one had ever envisioned Dasher trying to smash its way through the Jovian atmosphere.

  “You can outrun ’em if they don’t knock out the other engine,” she advised with her engineer’s tone, noting that she had over tw
enty kilograms of precious antimatter contained in the ship’s magnetic bottles. Then she sighed: “Won’t work, Maggie, they’ll just radio ahead. You’ve got to lose them somehow.”

  Whatever happens, she continued silently, they can’t get this ship. She smiled as that dark thought led her through a darker series to an image of Dasher’s antimatter evaporating through the magnetic containment in one vast explosion. Twenty kilograms of the stuff would probably shake up ol’ Jove himself, she mused. Pressure was rising rapidly in the spaceship. Vibrations through the floor plates and groans in the thin air warned Margaret that, even holed, Dasher’s hull was feeling the increased pressure. Margaret was glad when Dasher passed below the ammonia ice clouds, the thinnest of Jupiter’s clouds: it gave her the first little something to hide her ship under.

  Later, at a pressure of slightly over six atmospheres, under the rusty orange of Jupiter’s ammonium hydrosulfide clouds, Margaret made two rapid firings to keep Dasher from descending further. When Dasher groaned threateningly against the light thrust of the MAM engine, Margaret hastily reduced the thrust and increased its duration. She understood the tiny ship’s predicament: movement in her hardsuit was laborious, and several times she had had to stop herself hyperventilating from the fear that her suit was leaking or, worse, buckling. Overriding the suit’s controls, she increased the internal pressure to five atmospheres—adding nitrogen, as she knew that oxygen at this pressure would literally cook her from the inside out. The increased internal pressure reduced the difference between outside pressure to one atmosphere. Margaret hoped that the suit would handle the one atmosphere difference; she was depending on it.

  She checked radar. The two destroyers were over ten kilometers behind her and seventy-five kilometers above her-high up where the pressure was less than one atmosphere. Dasher’s speed through the thick atmosphere was heating the ship up at an alarming rate. From the cockpit Margaret could see the near-white glow from Dasher’s nose. The temperature inside her suit was also rising. Maggie started sweating profusely, and cursed the fact that the extra pressure of her suit made her sweat just stick to her skin.

  “Drink your water, Trudeaux,” she growled to herself and suited actions to words, squirming in her helmet to drink from the water nipple. Dehydration in these circumstances would be fatal.

  “Damn, now I’m hungry,” she complained. “Low blood sugar,” her scientific side noted.

  “Well, the ice cream’s melted for sure,” she told herself flippantly. “Probably spoiled, too.” She checked the pressure gauge: it was dropping, telling her that Dasher had started its ascent from its roller-coaster plunge through Jupiter’s air. Gratefully, she vented some of the excess pressure in her suit.

  “About time, too. Now you’ve got two choices: continue up and surrender or stay down here. Either way your goose is cooked.” Her stomach growled at her poor choice of words.

  As if in response to her stomach, the quart of ice cream she had left in the galley chose that moment to waft serenely over her head and bounce sickly against the forward viewport. With a sense of irony Maggie noted that the outside was liquid, something she had been trying to accomplish when the enemy had first attacked her only—she glanced at the chronometer—twelve minutes before.

  “Well now, Trudeaux, you’ve got two riddles to solve: how to get away from two enemy destroyers before you burn up and how to eat ice cream under six atmospheres!” She noticed that her words were somewhat slurred now, and that made her worried that her suit might be leaking. A quick glance at her inboard monitor panel reassured her; she decided that her tongue was feeling the effects of the extra pressure.

  Or is it because you’re starving, she wondered. Now what was it they had said at the Academy? “When you have several problems, sometimes the best solution is to combine them into one large problem and solve it.”

  So where did that leave her? Nowhere. The two problems were separate.

  Well, Maggie, she thought to herself, you always wanted a combat job! She snorted. “How could you have guessed that your only weapon would be ice cream!”

  How do you get away from two enemy destroyers using only ice cream?

  “That’s simple,” Margaret voiced, “throw it at them.” She pursed her lips while she pondered the possibility. If she just kicked the ice cream out the door, it would continue on in the same orbit until she thrust Dasher away. The differences in velocity between the ice cream and the destroyers would pick the ice cream up on radar long before it was a danger and vaporize it. But if the destroyers did not know it was ice cream and did not detect it until it was too close, say a kilometer, then the destroyers would have to make a massive orbit change to avoid the mysterious projectile. And if any of the ice cream did actually hit—Margaret frowned as she worked the numbers through in her head, and sighed—all it would do was make a loud noise.

  “Now all you have to do is shoot the ice cream at them and make it invisible,” Maggie muttered aloud. Well, shooting it wasn’t difficult: stuff the ice cream in the airlock, tight against the outer door, override the mechanism enough to force the airlock to open only to the diameter of one of the ice cream containers and—whoosh!—out they fly at a fair clip. Maggie worked the numbers out and found that her airlock thrust chamber would give her a respectable 700-meter-per-second velocity difference. She calculated the impact energy for eleven two-kilogram objects and grinned. “Now to make ’em invisible!”

  With part of her next problem solved, Maggie focused on the present and examined the control panels, noting that hull temperature was well within limits. Through the viewport she could see that she was passing through Jupiter’s ammonia ice clouds. Soon she would be outside of Jupiter’s atmosphere and a good target for the destroyers.

  “Time’s almost up, Trudeaux,” she told herself. “Think! You’ve got to make them blink.”

  “Let’s see: they’re going to see the ice cream liquid or solid. The containers will hardly make a blip, but they haven’t got any mass and no one’s going to jump away from something they can’t see.” Maggie shook her head. “The only chance is to make a hot radar blip when they aren’t expecting it. They know you’ve got antimatter aboard, so a quick blip on their screens would probably scare ’em all the way out to Pluto.”

  Maggie sighed, looking out the viewport in an effort to distract her consciousness from a problem best left to her subconscious. The last wisps of Jupiter’s clouds were passing off to one side. Maggie thought about those ammonia ice crystals and how they must look as they fell, warmed on the outside, solid ice cores surrounded by liquid. “That’s it! They’ll light up like Christmas trees!”

  Radar beams going through the liquid ice cream at a distance would probably produce a very weak or nonexistent return, just faint enough to convince the enemy that they were nothing to worry about. And radar beams going through solid ice cream would only produce a slightly greater return. But while neither liquid nor solid were much on radar, a liquid-solid boundary layer was a fantastic radar reflector. If she managed it just right the enemy would suddenly see incredibly powerful returns on radar and think she had unleashed some secret weapon. No telling what they would do. “But they’ll certainly blink!”

  Now, how to deliver that heat when required? She glanced around the cabin and made her way to the rear. Because Dasher was an experimental ship, lots of spare equipment was left aboard for ease of use.

  In the rear of the craft, strapped in or magnetically attached, were all sorts of measuring equipment. There were thermo-couples, ohmmeters, magnetometers, vibration transducers, all sorts of useful equipment for dealing with the effects of an enclosed matter/antimatter unit. But Maggie could see nothing that could be used to generate heat.

  As her search grew more frantic the rear of the cabin became a dangerous constellation of flying discards as Maggie flung them away in disgust at their inability to meet her simple needs.

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��Just one radio-controlled heating unit,” she begged. “Even one would do the job!” No good. She had completed her inspection and re-inspection as castoffs floated back in and out of her vision. A glare at the control panels assured her that she didn’t have the time to make one.

  “Face it, Margaret Trudeaux, you’re licked.” She shook her head while saying it, as if her body were in revolt against her mind’s conclusion. It was her first command! And she didn’t have anything that could even scare the enemy! An idle, detached part of her mind noted that soon the enemy would be in range again, they would finish the crippling of Dasher and board her, their magnetic boots clanging on the hull. They would cycle the airlock and they would find Maggie there . . .

  “Singing!” Maggie exclaimed. She scanned the scattering debris of her earlier search with renewed energy. Margaret was looking for only one thing: a vibration transducer. It was nothing more than a microphone that was attached by suction or magnetism. The microphone would pick up the noise of unwanted vibration and transmit it back to the receiver. Margaret whooped for joy when she found the receiver-it was a transceiver. Often it was desirable to not only record the vibrations of a test item but also to induce vibrations. The gear on board Dasher could do both: it could receive the vibrations picked up by the transducers or it could transmit vibrations through the transducers. And vibrations would produce heat! A resonance, the ice cream would heat up fastest and produce the required thin liquid layer. It did not have to be much, less than a tenth of a millimeter would do nicely.

  Margaret picked up the box of transducers and the transceiver and brought it back to the galley. She left the box in the galley and brought the transceiver forward to the control room. Up in the control room, she secured the transceiver by its magnetic clamps and reviewed the positions of the enemy through her radar. The two destroyers were now closing upon her, the range about forty kilometers. Another twenty kilometers closer and the enemy would be within firing range. A couple of flashes on radar indicated that the destroyers were willing to try for a lucky shot even at this range. Margaret cursed them and hoped that their weaponry would blow up. For her plan to work the enemy would have to get a lot closer. She would have to let them within ten kilometers of Dasher before she could launch her gastronomic artillery.