Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)

by Craig Alanson

  I slumped my head against the back of my helmet, giving my feeble mind time to process the incredible news. “We can fly the ship on our own? Like, fly it far?”

  “To Paradise and back, or even farther. You monkeys will still need to program jumps, and no matter how well I explain the theory to the pilots and the science team, the jumps you program will never come close to my level of accuracy. However, you should be able to match or exceed the accuracy of Kristang jumps. Not that their jump accuracy is anything to brag about, but you are a bunch of ignorant monkeys, so I am grading on a curve.”

  “We appreciate it.” Wheels were spinning in my mind, imagining the possibilities. “We could send the Dutchman out on recon missions, while you stay on Earth to protect our homeworld?”

  “Yes! Except that without me, the ship has no way to reopen that wormhole I shut down.”

  “Ah, crap. I forgot about that.”

  “And except that if anything major goes wrong, the Dutchman will be stranded a thousand lightyears from Earth with no way to get home, and no way for me to help.”

  “Damn it.”

  “And except that, with the Merry Band of Pirates, something major always goes wrong.”

  “Got it. You made your point.”

  “And, there is no way in hell I would agree to be stuck on your crappy, flea-bitten shithole of a planet, while a troop of screeching monkeys takes this ship careening around the galaxy on a drunken joyride.”

  “Got it. I said, I got it.”

  “The advantage of you being able to fly the ship on its own is as a safety factor, not so you can drag-race the ship when you think Uncle Skippy isn’t watching.”

  “I know that. And thank you, this is awesome. Hey, this new AI, will it be Nagatha?”

  “What? No. The new AI will not even talk to you at all, what it mostly does is run the ship’s autonomic functions behind the scenes. Like, handle all the stuff you don’t even notice. Ugh, the last thing I need is you monkeys getting distracted by chatting blah, blah, blah with another AI. Compared to me, this new AI is a toaster, kind of a dumb toaster.”

  “Uh huh, yeah, but could it be Nagatha? Could you bring her back and let her manage this new AI, be its voice or something?”

  “That would be a NO, Joe. Cramming the new AI into the available hardware was like stuffing ten pounds in a five-pound bag. There is no room left for an AI to nag me.”

  “I understand that, Skippy. My question is, what happens with the current Thuranin computer, after you fully cut over to the new AI?”

  “Nothing,” his voice had a touch of surprise in it. “Well, part of it will continue to run subsidiary systems under direction of the new AI. The rest could be used for spare parts, I guess.”

  “Or,” I suggested, “you could use the rest of the Thuranin system to host Nagatha’s presence or essence or whatever you call it.”

  “Ugh. Damn it, I fell right into that trap. Ok, yes, I could load Nagatha into that-”

  “You owe her, Skippy. We all owe her, but especially you, ya little shithead. She risked her life to go into your canister and wake you up, after your dumbass lack of judgment got you and all of us into trouble.”

  “Technically, she was never alive, Joe. And if the worm had gotten me, she would eventually have ceased to function also, so when you really think about it-”

  “Coward. You’re avoiding the subject and you know it. You owe her. Period.”

  “Well-”

  “Uh!” I held up a finger to shush him even though I was miles away from the ship. “Period, Skippy. End of discussion. Do you want me to bring Gunny Adams into this argument?”

  “Adams? What does Margaret have to do with this?”

  “Adams is a Marine. Their motto is ‘Semper Fidelis’, which means ‘Always Faithful’. Always. Even when you don’t feel like doing something. Especially when you don’t feel like doing something. Nagatha risked herself for you. You need to uphold your end of the bargain.”

  “Margaret would think I am faithless, if I don’t take the opportunity to bring back Nagatha, even though her matrix is truly only a fancy communications subroutine?”

  “Adams would consider you lower than a snake’s belly. Me too.”

  “Oh, crap. All right, all right, I’ll do it. If I can. No promises, monkeyboy.”

  “Outstanding. If you are half as awesome as you brag about, it should be no problem for you, right?”

  “Shit. I hate my life. Ohhhh, damn it. This is going to epically suck, like nothing has ever sucked in the history of the universe.”

  “Come on, Skippy. There are way worse things in the history of the universe. Could it suck worse than your car breaking down in the second lane of the Jersey Turnpike in heavy traffic the night before Thanksgiving, when it is like thirty four degrees and pouring down rain?”

  “That has never happened to you, that I know of.”

  “Thankfully, it hasn’t, I was trying to think of something that superduper totally sucks.”

  “Truly, driving the Jersey Turnpike in nice weather sucks by itself, but you have no idea how bad reviving Nagatha will be for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because with all the space available in that Thuranin computer, she could expand her matrix in ways I can’t predict. Joe, she might even become fully sentient. Unlikely, but my life sucks, so it’s bound to happen. You know, heh heh, reactivating Nagatha’s matrix is a tricky process; it would be a shame if something were to go wrong. If you know what I mean.”

  “It would be a shame, because Adams would never forgive you.”

  “Never?”

  “Neh-ver.”

  “Damn it! I have demonstrated my awesomeness so often, that now you monkeys expect me to do the impossible.”

  “You told us you make the impossible seem ordinary, Oh Great One.”

  “Shit! Hey, how did my giving you great news spin out of control for me?”

  “The universe hates me, Skippy. Maybe hanging around me has given you some bad karma. Anyway, how about you tell the science team, and the crew, your good news? We need to get the crew started on training to use the new system to fly the ship. I assume you have bodaciously amazing PowerPoint slides for training materials?”

  “Oh, crap, I forgot all about that. I will have to create a training manual, and revise the control displays in the bridge and CIC, and program simulations. What a huge pain in the ass!”

  “How long will that take?” I asked anxiously, knowing our hotshot pilots would be bugging me about training two seconds after they heard the news.

  “Huh? Oh, I just did that. A full training regimen is available now.”

  “You, uh, see what you did there, right? Creating a training program in a nanosecond is why we expect you to do the impossible.”

  “It was zero point seven nanoseconds, smartass. Ah! Damn it! I just did it again! Joe, the next time I boast about my incredible awesomeness, please remind me how much that gets me into trouble.”

  “Sure thing, Skippy,” I bit my lip, because I knew there was no way that arrogant little shithead could resist bragging about himself. “Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart, that goes for all of us unworthy monkeys. We truly appreciate it.”

  “Ha! As if! You are not capable of understanding my awesome- Crap! I just did it again!”

  “Yeah, well, until you can purge that energy virus from the ship, us monkeys being able to fly it by ourselves is just a theory.”

  “Good point. I shouldn’t have mentioned it yet, but I figured, you are drifting in space with nothing else to do, so I was making conversation.”

  “Skippy, you are right that I have absolutely nothing to do but wait until the dropship powercells are cold and dead. Wait! Before you start singing showtunes at me, I’m going to read about what the hell kind of trouble Perkins has gotten into this time.”

  “Good idea, Joe. I took a few liberties with filling in the details, the report I downloaded was kind of skimpy.” />
  “She’s really in trouble?”

  “Well, she was. Now the entire population of Paradise is facing extinction.”

  “Oh, crap. Hey, now that my suit is working again, can I pull up the report in my suit visor?”

  “Done.”

  Text appeared in my helmet visor, I could control how fast it scrolled by eyeclicks. It looked like a long report but I had nothing else to do. “Thanks, I’ll start reading.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Emily Perkins raced through the dense forest as if she were being chased by a bear, running flat-out. The Ruhar combat skinsuit she wore enhanced her speed, and included sensors and stabilizers to compensate for her slow human reaction time, but the blinking yellow dots in the synthetic view projected onto the inside her of helmet visor showed the enemy was getting closer with every second. Every time she stumbled on the uneven ground, every time she had to leap over a fallen log, every time she ducked to clear a low-hanging tree branch, she lost ground to her pursuers.

  Time. They needed time. “Jarrett! Cover fire!” Perkins ordered, hating the words as she spoke but they had no choice. Jesse Colter and Dave Czajka were already dead, she had seen them fall to enemy fire and their icons now blinked red as their suits reported life functions had ceased.

  It was a disaster, a total disaster. She was about to lose her entire team in the space of a few minutes. The enemy was too fast, too skilled, and humans had too little time with their advanced Ruhar combat gear. They never had a chance. Colter and Czajka had remained behind to set up an ambush, so Perkins, Jarrett and their alien liaison Nert might get away, but their sacrifice had been for nothing. Even firing from a well-chosen defilade position, behind the crest of a rise in the ground and between fallen logs that gave good cover, the two human soldiers accounted for only four enemy dead, before they had both been killed by guided rockets that shredded their bodies despite the tough but flexible skinsuits.

  “On it!” Shauna replied and dropped to the ground instantly, rolling over to rest behind a tree. Her ragged breathing made her head bob around so much inside the helmet that she could not eyeclick to engage the targeting system, so she relied on the scope of her rifle. Seven yellow dots were advancing in good order, two on the left, two on the right and three in the center. The enemy moved fast, so fast over broken ground. Their tactics were excellent, leapfrogging from cover to cover, with one group laying down suppressing fire while the other two groups raced ahead. Since Jesse and Dave had shot four of the enemy, they had grown wary of the sting even lowly humans could inflict, so they had taken to using cover wherever they could find it.

  She looked away from the rifle’s targeting scope to see the terrain around her, verifying the info from the synthetic view projected onto the inside of her helmet’s visor. A little voice in her head reminded her that those seven yellow dots were a guess, a composite image based on data collected by her suit’s passive sensors. The sensors had a wide variety of data to work with. As the enemy moved, they created vibrations in the air that were picked up as faint sounds, although the enemy’s own suits sent out dampener waves that partly canceled out their own vibrations, and could also project false vibrations at a distance of up to a quarter kilometer. By moving at high speed through the air, the enemy left ionized trails through the air but, these too could be false sensor data because ion trails could be masked or faked. Heat from overworked bodies and the powered suits was a good source of passive location data, except in combat mode their mech suits could temporarily store heat in a sink so the suit’s surface matched the surrounding temperature. Often the best source of data were brief bursts of laser light as the enemy’s suits kept up a line-of-sight datalink between them, but her own suit could only detect backscatter of those laser pulses and the enemy suits constantly projected false pulses to confuse her sensors. Like her own Ruhar skinsuit, the enemy’s armor had a limited stealth and chameleon capability, so she could not even trust her own eyes. The enemy could be approximately where the visor indicated, or those could be false images based on outdated or faked data. Stilling her breathing, she successfully eyeclicked after two missed attempts, and adjusted to sniper mode.

  The yellow dots changed to yellow circles, to show the true probable location of the enemy, and Shauna cursed to herself. Those rings displaying the ‘circular error of probability’ were big, too big to be useful to her for targeting. Worse, three of the circles were a pale, blinking yellow, showing the sensors did not trust the data on those three enemy soldiers. And there weren’t only seven circles. Off to the right were two fuzzy pink circles, the visor’s way of telling her there might be nine of the enemy facing her. She told herself there could be as few as five actual people out there chasing her, but five-to-one odds were nearly as bad as nine-to-one.

  Damn it! Shauna screamed in her head but no sound came from her mouth. To shout would pinpoint her position to the enemy as surely as if she had turned off her stealthware and stood up in full view.

  Think, Shauna, think. I need to find—

  One of the yellow circles became a bright yellow dot with a blinking green arrow pointing to it, which Shauna knew meant her suit had picked up a transient, a short spike of data. Probably a sound, such as someone stepping on a dry twig in the forest. The enemy would know their mistake and move to throw off her targeting, so she reacted without hesitation, gently depressing her rifle’s trigger button. Invisible bolts of maser energy lanced out, stitching a line across trees and undergrowth and she heard a panicked scream.

  Shauna did not wait to verify she had hit the target; she rolled to her right into a shallow depression and wiggled backwards then got on hands and knees when she could, crawling quickly and keeping low. Although the maser energy was invisible to the naked eyes of her and the enemy, all their suits could see the maser bolts clearly and her position had been pinpointed exactly. The tree she had used for cover was being sliced apart by maser beams, chunks blowing off the trunk as the water within the wood boiled and exploded from the microwave energy. She was pelted by flying splinters of charred wood but none of the deadly beams hit her.

  Now the targeting data was resolving as the enemy rushed her position, three circles becoming dots as her suit became supremely confident of the enemy’s location. Shit! She cursed inwardly. Another yellow dot wasn’t moving, representing the soldier she had shot, but the formerly pink circles to her right were now yellow dots, racing past her. The enemy was engaging with only three soldiers, while the others continued to pursue Perkins and Nert. Damn it! She had no chance to do anything about the soldiers that had already outflanked her. “Colonel Perkins, at least four have gotten past me and are moving in your direction.”

  The only reply was a click, as Perkins could not risk giving away her own position by transmitting more than nanosecond burst. Ok, what to do next? Shauna could run, the direction would not matter as she couldn’t hope to escape. To qualify for infantry duty with the US Army, she had trained to the point where every muscle in her body screamed at her, to the point where soft-tissue injuries risked ruining her dreams. A partially torn rotator cuff, a sprained ACL, sharp heel pain from plantar fasciitis, she had not let any of that delay her training, not let mere pain stop her from proving she was physically capable of keeping up with male soldiers. Now, with the incredible technology of the Ruhar combat skinsuit, she could run, jump, lift just like any man. In some ways, her better fine motor control allowed her to handle a rifle better than a human man, that is why she had been designated the team’s sniper.

  Sniper. That’s what she needed to do. The three yellow dots in front of her had stopped moving and were now slowly becoming circles as her suit lost confidence in their exact location. She knew the enemy was similarly unsure of her position, perhaps more unsure as she had stopped moving before they did and she had not been racing through the forest making noise.

  Slowly, she rose up onto her elbows and eyeclicked to dim the synthetic view, zooming in her sight on the real world,
relying on old-fashioned photons reflecting off objects into her eyes. Nothing. She used the dimmed synthetic view to guide her eyes, but there wasn’t anything useful to see out there. Trees, bushes, undergrowth, vines hanging down. The area was near a river and the ground was spongy and swampy in spots, with plants like dark-colored ferns growing densely in clumps. The vines were a hazard, they were not poisonous and most did not have thorns, but they hung down and a running person could get tripped or tangled easily. She saw vines swaying where the enemy must have passed by, for there was little wind that day to stir the air. Swaying vines only told her where the enemy had been, not where they were, and the circles in her visor slowly grew larger as her suit lost track of the enemy.

  There! A clump of ferns moved in a sudden jerk and Shauna’s pinky finger selected her rifle’s railgun mode. Masers were no good for shooting through underbrush; she needed the explosive-tipped flechettes of the railgun. Ruhar rifles were almost silent, as the masers made no sound at all until they hit something. In conditions of rain or high humidity the air could sizzle quietly as the beam passed through, but that was minor compared to the explosive crack of Kristang projectile weapons. Even the flechettes were quiet, because the electromagnetic rails accelerated the flechettes to just below the local speed of sound, avoiding a supersonic boom. The flechettes had a limited ability to guide themselves to a target, and they had tiny rocket motors to extend their range and kinetic impact so the explosive-tipped flechettes hit with nearly the same velocity they left the rifle barrel. Shauna had at first been skeptical of a rifle with such low muzzle velocity, until she gained experience firing the weapon and now she loved it. Even the nearly-silent railgun could be detected by enemy sensors, but the emitted sound was rarely loud enough to pinpoint the shooter’s location. Against Kristang, she could select a ‘Double-tap’ mode; a maser bolt followed by a flechette round. The maser beam hit the rigid armor of a Kristang suit, burning off and weakening the outer layer and providing a hot spot for the flechette to guide itself into. When the flechette hit the weakened area of the armor, it would punch through and launch its binary explosive inside to churn a Kristang body into jelly.