Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)

by Craig Alanson

  “Oh this is not going well.”

  In his visor display, Renee Giraud could see the location of every member of his team and he could see Smythe’s team of four people. Technically, he could not see anything beyond the inner faceplate of his suit, because the entire assault team was wrapped in stealth fields, so photons from the local star and even the faint glimmer of surrounding starlight were neatly bent around each soldier. More importantly, even if any photons had managed to bounce off a soldier’s armor, they would never reach Giraud’s eyes, as his own stealth field curved those photons around him like he wasn’t there are all. So, his vision was provided by sensors at the end of four ultrathin wires, projecting in front, back and to each side. Those sensors passively collected data which allowed him to periodically puff his jetpack’s thrusters to avoid colliding with a space rock, and they received weak, low-power burst transmissions from the suits of other people. The datalink between the team only told Giraud where his people were, their condition and the status of their suits. It did not tell him what he really needed to know; where his target dropship was located and what it was doing.

  The two teams coasted through space, only using their jetpacks to dodge rocks and chunks of ice as they glided silently through the cloud of comet debris. From sunlight shining off objects in front of him, Giraud’s suit could see obstacles he needed to avoid, although his suit was regularly pelted by fine particles of dust and ice that he could not avoid. The impacts were so gentle at the slow speed the team was moving relative to the cloud, that there was no danger to suits or the humans inside, though everyone had the armored shield lowered over their faceplates for maximum safety.

  Everything was going exactly according to the plan Smythe and Giraud had developed, which worried the Frenchman, because almost nothing ever went right on a Plan A for the Merry Band of Pirates. In the rare case that a Plan A did go well, karma was sure to make them pay the price later.

  Skippy had assured them they could successfully complete the assault with only two people on each team, and one of them was for support and backup. Four on each team was a compromise to have enough people to complete the operation if something went wrong, and not having too many people’s lives at risk if something went seriously wrong.

  “There has been no reaction from either dropship to your presence,” Skippy reported. “Your portable stealth fields are working optimally, you can thank me for the enhancements, by the way. Unless they move suddenly, my masking of their sensor probe should conceal your approach.”

  “Acknowledged,” Giraud replied quietly and he heard Smythe do the same. Skippy had not been able to infiltrate and take control of the dropships the way he had with the destroyer, but his magic was able to help significantly. With the dropships encased in surprisingly effective stealth fields, they each would be blind if not for a probe extending forward from the nose, and a sensor at the end of a stiff cable trailing behind. Those tiny sensors were outside the stealth field, passively picking up data from the surrounding space. The greatest danger of discovery for the assault team was if one of them had to maneuver suddenly to avoid a chunk of rock, even the cold gas thrusters used by the jetpacks might be detected if used close enough to the dropships. In the final approach, there was also a risk of even typically crappy Kristang sensors noticing the spatial distortion created by the individual stealth fields of the assault team.

  To help the assault teams, Skippy had performed what he considered a rather lame bit of magic. Using microwormholes he had very gently moved into position behind each dropship, he projected stealth fields through the event horizon and wrapped them around the sensor trailing behind the dropships. With the sensors now unable to receive real photons from outside the stealth field, Skippy fed false data to the sensors, data which showed only happy views of utterly benign, empty space other than the rocks and ice the Kristang expected. The beer can had wanted to try transmitting a virus down the sensor cable, to partially take control of the dropships that way, but Little Joey Bishop the Buzzkill Party Pooper had vetoed that no doubt cool but risky and unnecessary stunt. So, Skippy was bored while he waited for the assault team to get close enough to use their jetpacks to slow down for the intercept.

  Giraud ran a status check on his suit, jetpack, weapons and other gear, then he did the same for the other three members of his team, though he could see they had all run status checks. Then he concentrated on examining what was known about his target, now that he was getting close enough for his suit’s sensors to directly pick up the extremely low-power datalink through the microwormhole behind the dropship. At first, all seemed normal, the target appeared to be a mostly ordinary Kristang model the Pirates referred to as a Dragon-B. There were some pods attached under the stubby wings and one running along the top of the cabin, Giraud assumed they were part of the enhanced stealth gear. Everything was as expected, and he saw no reason to make even minor changes to the assault plan.

  Then he saw something that shocked him. “Merde. Mister Skippy, the image I am seeing,” he paused to eyeclick through a menu to zoom in on and then enhance the data. “On the nose of that dropship, there is a symbol. Is that, it can’t be, it,” his voice sputtered to a halt, too astonished to continue. He took a sip of sugar water to give his mind time to recover. “Did the Kristang paint on the nose of their ship a, a, Hello Kitty?”

  “What? Oh, hahahahahahaha!” The beer can guffawed with laughter. “You thought that was real? Oh, man, you monkeys are endlessly gullible! Damn, it is almost not any fun to screw with you, it is just too easy. I’ll suck it up and keep doing it, of course.”

  “You are showing me a false image?” Giraud demanded.

  “Oh come on, Renee,” Skippy scolded playfully. “Technically, with that dropship wrapped in a stealth field, any image I show you is false. All I can get from the sensor data through the wormholes is a rough outline, so I know the model and basic configuration. Anything else is a guess. The wormholes are close enough that I could pretty accurately map the exterior of that ship by projecting a sensor field, but as that would immediately alert the lizards they are being tracked, I should probably not do that, mmmm?”

  “No,” Giraud bit off a sarcastic reply. “Do not do that. Please could you-what?”

  “Is that better?” In the data feed, Skippy had replaced the Hello Kitty nose art with a popular French comic book character Asterix the Gaul, complete with wings atop his helmet and a generously drooping mustache.

  “Better, yes. Better than that would be to not show us data you are guessing at.”

  “What would be the fun in that? You’ve got to let me amuse myself while I’m waiting, since you monkeys aren’t doing anything to amuse me. Hey! I have a great idea! You will be conducting a dangerous assault in nine minutes, how about some appropriately stirring music to get you pumped up?”

  “That would be an awful idea. Do not-”

  “Too late! Prepare to be dazzled by ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ by Wagner.”

  “Ha!” Giraud thought he had been saved from the jaws of death. “That is an instrumental piece, Skippy, you can’t sing it.”

  “Oh you are SO wrong, mon enfant. Most people think there are no lyrics because they are used to hearing the orchestral version. You don’t speak German, so I will take pity on you and sing the English-language version.”

  “No!”

  The music began with instruments, and at first the French paratrooper thought he had gotten lucky. Then the beer can began to sing, if such an out-of-tune warble could be called singing. “Oh warfather on high, I am calling you from the battlefield, and as I take my last breath, I call for the mightiest of miracles.”

  “Now I know why you never hear the lyrics,” Giraud muttered, but Skippy ignored him and plunging on singing lustily.

  “For none but the brave, be he king or a slave, with pounding heart in his chest, will be worthy to rise and with the Valkyries fly-”

  Giraud considered that after he departed from that worl
d, the humans on Paradise had suffered from attack by Kristang warships. They had survived for years on whatever plants they could grow, enduring a bland and mostly vegetarian diet. They had been forcibly relocated, first to the steaming jungles of equatorial Lemuria, then to the temperate southern region of that continent. Perhaps the worst deprivation humans on Paradise suffered was being cut off from Earth, never hearing from their loved ones back home. They lived every day in fear that the Ruhar would turn against the aliens who had come to the planet as an occupation force. And from communications Skippy had intercepted, the vast majority of humans stranded far from home feared the population of their home world may have been enslaved or exterminated by the Kristang.

  Despite all the suffering and deprivation endured by humans on Paradise, none of them ever had to listen to a beer can singing. Not for the first time, Renee Giraud asked himself if he had made a terrible mistake by volunteering, way back when a publicity-stunt colonel named Joe Bishop had dropped out of the sky in a stolen Ruhar dropship, and announced he had a lunatic plan to hit the Kristang. What the hell was I thinking, Giraud asked himself as he listened to Skippy warble his way through the opera.

  “I’m dying and glad to bleed, because I know todaaaay, I take my place with the heroes in Valhaaaaaaala of old- oh, damn it, I have to stop, you need to prepare for the boarding operation.”

  “Thank God. Skippy, I would rather not die and be glad to bleed today, if you don’t mind.”

  “Would you prefer to skip the fighting songs and listen to me sing selections from ‘Madame Butterfly’?”

  “In that case, I would very much prefer the bleeding and dying option, please.”

  “Hmm,” Skippy sniffed. “You pirates have no culture. No matter now, because you need to lead your team on yet another ill-advised crazy stunt.”

  “Ill-advised? This was your idea,” Giraud fumed inside his armored suit.

  “Yes, but you monkeys were dumb enough to listen to a beer can. You don’t see me out there flying around, do you? No, I am staying safe and warm aboard the Dutchman, while you hotshot types eagerly zoom into the unknown. Well, you crazy kids have fun, let me know what happens.”

  The period of increased danger was when both assault teams, coordinating their actions exactly, programmed their jetpacks to slow their approach. The jetpacks had main engines that could not be used because their hot exhaust would be too visible so close to the targets, so they relied on a lengthy, intermittent pulsing of the cold-gas thrusters. Even doing that was risky, because to slow the users, the jetpacks vented the gas forward to go flying past the targets. Soon, the sensor probes extending forward beyond the noses of the dropships detected an unusual amount of gas floating past. Yes, the sensors noted, the gas was the normal ratio of hydrogen and other elements always present in the solar wind, and it was no more warm nor cold than the surrounding cloud, but the gas density was unusual. If the bored pilots had been paying attention to their instruments, they might have been curious about the anomaly, but all four pilots were half asleep since they had absolutely nothing to do until it was time to put the disgusting humans into aeroshells.

  Without the pilots’ request, the sensor system would still have sent out an alert on their own, except for the trick played by the assault team. In addition to a jetpack, weapons, grappling gear, portable stealth field generator and extra power packs, each suit had a package attached to the chest, and that device activated when the thrusters began gently pulsing.

  The packages were filled with fine dust and ice that exactly matched the composition of a broken comet that had created the meteor shower cloud. Each package expelled a puff of this dust and ice to match the thrusters, sending the contents forward to flow around the dropships. Mere minutes before the Kristang sensor systems would have sent an alarm to the pilots, they finished analyzing the contents of the particles drifting past from the rear, and concluded there must have been a disturbance of some sort in the debris cloud. Perhaps the entry of the dropships into the cloud had caused objects to collide, or a passing asteroid had smacked its way through the cloud. Whatever the explanation, it was nothing particularly unusual or worth alerting the pilots about. So, the sensor systems continued quietly monitoring the area as they had been instructed to do, and the pilots never knew there had been an anomaly.

  Maximum danger was when, one by one, the assault team slowly entered the stealth fields of the dropships. Jetpacks had slowed them to match the exact speed of the dropships so the teams were motionless relative to their still-unseen targets, and each pirate was also wrapped in a stealth field. Using thrusters so close to the enemy was too dangerous, so a paratrooper holding onto Giraud gave his leader a gentle push with his arms, sending Giraud slowly inward and the paratrooper away from the dropship. As he slipped inside the stealth field, Giraud’s own stealth generator matched frequency to avoid distorting the larger field. That frequency changed as he got closer to the dropship’s hull, and he had to rely on Skippy controlling the generator through the microwormhole, and an ultrathin cable extending from his suit to the world outside the enveloping field. Encased in his own stealth and the field created by the dropship, he was utterly blind. Except the synthetic vision provided by his visor had a low-quality image provided by Skippy, as that beer can mapped tiny fluctuations in the stealth field lines.

  Giraud could not see the hull, he had no idea what color it was or any fine details, but he did not need that. He could see where to attach the grapple, and he did that at almost the same second Smythe’s team was doing the same to the other dropship.

  The two Kristang pilots in the dropship targeted by Giraud’s team were startled by a faint ping sound on the roof of the cabin, followed by a metallic scraping. Strapped into their seats, they looked upward fearfully, then at each other. There was another ping sound, this one gentler.

  That should not be happening. They were drifting in a cloud of dust, pebbles, chunks of ice and small rocks, but the entire cluster was flying in formation. Nothing should be colliding until they were much closer to the disruption of the planet’s gravity well. The dropship itself had substantial mass compared to most objects in the cluster, and if the dropship remained there long enough, its gravity would pull objects close to it. But that would take a long time, much longer than the Kristang had been in the swarm of ice and rock.

  The fact there was more than one ping sound was not usual, if the dropship had flown through a disturbance in the meteor cloud then it should have been struck by multiple objects. Fingers flying over the sensor controls, the copilot pulled up data showing there had indeed been an anomaly detected by the sensor gear, but seeing the data actually made him relax slightly and he pointed to the display. Whatever shower of pebbles had pinged off the dropship’s hull, it had been proceeded by a cloud of dust and ice too fine to have just been noticed by the pilots, but the sensors had noticed it. The pilot shrugged and widened the passive scan, looking for any nearby objects that might pose a danger to the craft he was responsible for. There wasn’t anything significant in the area, so if anything else bounced off the hull, it would be too small to pose any danger.

  The lead pilot yawned, wriggled in his seat to get comfortable again, and resumed playing the game he had paused. Getting humans into aeroshells, setting them on a proper course in the meteor cloud, then stealthily flying the dropship back to the Final Crushing Blow to the Enemy’s Spirit would be a long, exhausting process and the pilot wanted to relax while he could. The game was old but he was having more success than the last time he played it, and he was enjoying—

  Three things happened almost simultaneously. There was a sizzling sound and a bright light from the roof of the cockpit. The pilot’s ears popped as air pressure in the cockpit dropped and the rear cockpit door seal inflated. The visor of his helmet began to swing down automatically, too slowly to protect the pilot from the concussion grenade that was injected into the cockpit through the hole created by Giraud’s explosive-tipped power lance.


  The interior of the cockpit instantly became a shambles, displays shattered, controls knocked offline, pilot and copilot killed as the soft tissue of their brains were smashed by the hammer blows of air overpressure. If the cockpit had windows, they would have been blown out. Weak spots in the inner pressure hull developed cracks and air briefly leaked out until the nano-filled liquid sealant between hull layers filled in the gaps.

  With his boots now securely clamped to the hull above the cockpit, Giraud and another French paratrooper attached a probe to the lance they used to burn through the hull and inject the grenade. Pressing a trigger on top shot the probe down the hollow lance, and instantly they had a view of the shattered cockpit. “Both pilots appear dead,” Giraud reported.

  “I see that,” Skippy replied eagerly. “Scratch the word ‘appeared’, I can tell they are dead. Commence Phase Two.”

  Giraud gave the order and the other pair of soldiers activated their own lance above the main cabin, where they expected the Keepers to be. This second lance quickly burned through outer and inner hulls, injecting first a pair of long, thin flash-bang grenades to stun anyone in the cabin, then flooding the cabin with a fast-acting gas that had a temporary paralyzing effect on the human nervous system. That gas was followed by an anesthetic to render the immobile victims unable to resist when the assault team came through the airlock.

  “Skippy, do you have control yet?” Giraud asked anxiously while the right side of his visor showed him a view of the main cabin. Nine Keepers were strapped into seats, inert but breathing shallowly. One Keeper had acted quickly on his own initiative when the concussion grenade detonated in the cockpit, he had unstrapped himself and now floated upside-down near the roof of the cabin, his unconscious form bouncing off the ceiling. All ten of the humans had tiny droplets of blood seeping from their ears, the effect of the flash-bang grenade magnified in the confined, airtight space. Major Smythe had inquired whether they should modify the grenades to dial down the effect, but Colonel Bishop had instantly vetoed that idea when Skippy stated he was confident no one would be permanently injured by the devices. Bishop’s actual words had made even Giraud blush slightly, something like ‘F those F-ing MFers I’d like to stuff an F-ing grenade in their F-ing pie holes, serves those F-ing F-heads right’. That got a big laugh from the beer can, who suggested the Colonel should tell people how he really felt.