Mortal Protection Services Chapter 19: VI.OBB: Operation Bob Bomb

Read chapter 19 of Mortal Protection Services by B.T.Skull on NovelPedia.

VI.OBB: Operation Bob Bomb Jimantha Jimsonson Aboard The FSS Magellan Exploring beyond the FAP "So, we're going to drop out of warp in a steep dive into the target star, which I'll be calling Bob, for fun. We want to be on roughly a tangent line to Bob's core, not his surface. The timing will be tricky, because we need to get that cruiser to chase us down a bit outside of a warp bubble, all while dodging a full impact from the tadpole. When we hit the surface of the sun, and only then, do we drop the payload. After that, we dodge enemy fire for a moment longer, and when the payload has descended low enough..." The computer simulated animation showed the sun exploded and the little dot representing us riding the shock wave out. "We lean into it and surf to victory." "The payload... Dare I ask what it is?" Captain Kim was clearly nursing a hangover. Gerwerpterk had it worse next to him. At least the Captain's head was up. Gerwerpterk was here - physically - but not exactly present for duty. "It's all the grav plates, Captain, save a handful in engineering, and another set for the bridge, and of course the ones needed for the engines and shield systems to not flatten. She wants to strap every single plate we can spare to shuttle one and set the warp core to overload into them." Chief Shard was not pleased with my plan, but he had to admit, the math checked out. It would blow up the star, temperatures would reach well in excess of fifty million degrees in the area we'd be. "Also, it'll be vac suits for everyone-" I cut in, "Which is fine, because we won't want to be wasting power on lifesupport anyway. We're gonna need every last bit of juice we can get for shields. Either way we're probably all gonna die when we blow up the Bob-bomb. Which is why we're going to pack shuttle two with as many of the crew as we can, and they are gonna zip off and away with all the data we've collected a second or two before we drop out of warp. I've already made the modification specs for the shuttle to hit warp thirteen, briefly. Chief Shard's boys are already working on it." "Even a few seconds at that speed will have them halfway back to starbase one thirty two." Captain Kim's hungover math was pretty good. "Good news there, they'll have about thirty seconds before they burn out the engine. Should be plenty to get them back some place with enough life support capacity to sustain them all. Also, we're going to attach a pair of large cargo pods to the shuttle to stuff full of crew, like sardines. We just need a skeleton crew left on the ship. Bridge crew, plus four people in engineering. Ten total, myself included. I'll be in engineering." "Great. I'm not exactly loving this so far, but you've hit my main concern, the crew. As for us damned souls remaining on the ship, what's our plan of attempting survival?" Captain Kim took a big swig of his black coffee. "We're going to juice up the remaining shield emitter with the secondary warp core, and put as much of the ship's plating and bulkheads and mass as we possibly can between us and the star's core, try to ride it out like surfing a wave. I won't lie, it'll be ablative armor, the shields will protect us from being cooked alive, so long as they hold, and there's pretty good odds they won't." "And why aren't we warping out?" Gerwerpterk was alive. "The tadpole is probably going to end up attaching some chunks of space beef to the bottom of the ship soon as we drop out of warp. Tadpole will fire some chunks of itself at us like railgun rounds. We're gonna get hit, but at least we can decide where they hit. We can probably dodge the whole thing hitting us, but I got a feeling we are going to have to cook off the bottom of the ship one way or another. And the last thing we want to do is feed these things your tech. They learn from it the more they devour." "Alright everyone, you heard Jimmi's plan. We have five days until the flesh cruiser catches up to us at... ugh... Bob star." Captain Kim knocked bac