SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  “A while, as in you already did it between saying ‘need’ and ‘to’?”

  “Not this time, smart guy. Go, I don’t know, get some coffee, eat a banana, scratch yourself, do some monkey thing, and I’ll let you know when I’m done. Don’t bother me in the meantime, I’ll be super extra busy in here.”

  I took a quick shower, got dressed, walked to the galley, drank a cup of coffee, and chatted with a couple people. Then I walked to a porthole to look through the tiny window at nothing, because there is not much to see in deep interstellar space. Before going on duty, I got a second cup of coffee, and headed for the bridge. The whole time, I’d been expecting Skippy to shout in my earpiece that my idea was stupid, and about how monkeys only wasted his extremely valuable time. Thirty two minutes had passed since Skippy began his analysis, this was an eternity in Skippy time. He remained silent until I was halfway to the bridge.

  "Joe, I have good news and bad news." Skippy announced.

  Uh oh. Skippy's idea of good news could be bad, so I answered carefully "Give me the good news first, please." I stopped and leaned against the bulkhead. If he was going to tell me how stupid I was, I’d rather not be on the bridge where the duty crew could hear it.

  "The good news is I found some very good prospects for Elder sites that have not, as far as I know, been discovered by other species. You were right, although my memories are substantially blocked, my familiarity with the Elders allows me to extrapolate where they should have had colonies or other installations. What I did was-"

  I let him talk without interrupting, even though his rambling on about statistics, metadata and collating sensor mapping data from dozens of species went way over my head. He was proud of what he'd accomplished, it was likely only he could have run such an analysis in so short a time, if at all. When there was a split-second pause in his nonstop talking, I took the opportunity to stop him from rambling on. "Amazing, Skippy, that is amazing. Maybe this is why you have such enormous processing capacity, so you can find the Elders', uh, legacy, stuff, and protect it. Or keep track of it."

  "Huh. I hadn't considered that."

  Before he could go off on a half hour tangent of speculation about his origins, I asked "Have you verified your data model, by checking whether it predicts Elder sites that are confirmed? Elder sites that other species do know about?"

  "Verified my data model?" Skippy asked slowly in amazement. "Joe, where did you learn nerdy tech talk like that? I am mildly impressed, considering that it's you."

  "It was in one of the thousand-slide PowerPoint decks I'm supposed to study as officer training." Maybe I shouldn't have told him I was only repeating buzz words. "Did you do it?"

  "Yes, duh, I told you I ran the model back to determine accuracy within a standard deviation of-"

  "You tried to tell me. Remember, Skippy, you're explaining things to me, you need to dumb it down a couple notches. You can use real sciency math talk when you're discussing stuff with the science team."

  "Fair enough. Breaking it down Barney style, pun intended, the answer is yes, my method of predicting the location of Elder facilities is 96.7% accurate, when compared with a map of Elder sites known to current species."

  "Damn. That is impressive."

  "Ahhh, not so much, if you really understood the data." Skippy said sourly. "The Elder sites known to current species are the easy to find, obvious ones. The dumdums inhabiting the galaxy today only find Elder sites if they happen to trip over them in the dark, so to speak. Almost all of the Elder sites that have been mapped are in star systems capable of supporting carbon-based life. The unmapped sites, that I predict we should find, are mostly in star systems centered around obscure stars such as red dwarfs. I am not yet, of course, able to determine how good my model is at predicting the location of more obscure, minor Elder sites. However, I am highly confident."

  "Great. This time, your good news, is good news for sure. What's the bad news?"

  "The bad news is where we have to go to check out these unknown, potential sites. By definition, they are in out of the way locations, else they would have been discovered by now. The model predicts only a handful of sites that are conveniently close to our location."

  "Well, we will check out those-"

  "Whoa, whoa!" Skippy cautioned. "No so fast, hot shot, let me finish. Of the handful of predicted sites, two are inaccessible now, the stars they were orbiting have become red giants and swallowed those planets. Another site was in a star system where the star went nova; even if that site still exists, it is likely damaged, and we'd have a hell of a time finding it now, it would have been thrown off its original orbit in an unpredictable fashion. Three other sites remain undiscovered, but are in star systems occupied by species with equivalent, or superior, technology to this ship. It would be substantially risky to enter those star systems."

  "There's nothing we could check out around here?"

  "Oh, I didn't say nothing. There are four sites within a month of here. Two of those sites are good prospects, the other two are low probability."

  "Mmm hmm, within a month from here. How long to check out all four sites?"

  "Oof, you had to ask me that," Skippy sounded disgusted. "Uh, calculating now, a least-time course would take, meh, three and a half months, the sites are scattered inconveniently, we have to take roundabout routes through wormholes to get to all four sites."

  "Meh?" I said, surprised.

  "Huh?"

  "You said 'meh'. Like when something isn't bad, it isn't great, it's just, you know, 'meh'."

  "Oh, yeah. In this case, 'meh' was me suppressing my instincts, and telling you that the estimated transit time is three and half months, instead of me saying three months, seventeen days, ten hours, twenty one minutes and forty eight point two six seven seconds. Roughly."

  "Roughly? In the future, let's go with 'meh'."

  "I thought so. Also, that is average transit time, not including time to match course with the sites, fly down in dropships, explore the sites, all that."

  "Kind of implied, Skippy."

  "Yeah, you'd think so, but I'm trying to explain hyperspatial navigation to monkeys, so-"

  "Got it. Not all monkeys aboard this ship are as dumb as me-"

  "None of them are, Joe. Well, I'm only considering standard IQ tests in the crew's personnel files, of course." Skippy paused. "Oh. Hmm. Did I just insult you?"

  "Ya think?"

  "Hey, blame that facts, not the messenger. Besides, I've told you before, that the standard IQ tests of your species, are woefully inadequate predictors of ability to create innovative solutions to-"

  "Christ, Skippy, you sound like the buzzwords on those stupid PowerPoint slides that I'm supposed to study."

  "Sorry. To dumb it down for you," he said, while supposedly intending not to insult me, "somehow your tiny monkey brain is able to think of things, that my god-like intelligence misses. Like when you had the idea to get rid of the Kristang ships by jumping them into a gas giant. Or when you asked me how Thuranin fought in their flimsy space suits, because it didn't occur to me to tell you about their combots. None of your original merry band of pirates, who mostly had higher IQ scores than you, had those ideas. Joe, you may not be particularly smart in a conventional sense, but you apparently have a talent that is more useful in your current role; you are clever."

  "Space suits."

  "Darn it, you had to remind me. Yes, I hate to say it, but that is a good example."

  I was damned proud of myself. As a senior officer, I may be grossly inadequate for my responsibilities, according to the United States Army. As an infantry soldier, I had, in my humble opinion, good common sense, including the ability to ask obvious questions that everyone else was missing. Believe me, patrolling the Nigerian jungle in full battle rattle, on ill-defined missions, had caused me to ask a whole lot of common sense questions. "Thank you, Skippy. You can program us a course for the closest site?"

  "Already loaded into the nav system."

>   "Of course it is. Great, I'll tell the pilots." And everyone. No one had looking forward to a lonely, dull fourteen month voyage to the second site.

  Sitting in the command chair on the bridge, I was waiting for the jump engines to recharge. We had changed course to check out the closest of the sites where Skippy thought we might find an Elder facility that wasn’t known to the Thuranin or Jeraptha. I didn’t have much to do, and my mind wandered. "Skippy, something has been puzzling me."

  He made an exaggerated sigh. "Darn it, I knew this was going to happen sooner or later. All right, fine. Joey, when a Mommy and a Daddy love each other very much-"

  "I know about the birds and the bees, Skippy!" Damn it! I should have known better than to try asking Skippy a serious question while other people were around. In the CIC, I could see people smirking, and one of the pilot's shoulders were shaking as he laughed. At me.

  "Boy, that is a relief. The last thing I want to explain is monkey mating rituals. You're puzzled. Is this about shoe tying again? I think you'd be best to stick to Velcro until-"

  "You know why I need shoes? Because I can walk! Let's see you do that, beer can."

  "Whoa. That's the best you've got? Pretty lame, there, Joey."

  "I'm trying to be serious here, Skippy."

  Another sigh. "Fair enough. You do understand how difficult it is for me to take anything you monkeys say seriously, right? What is your question? If it's not outrageously stupid, I will consider wasting my time on you."

  "We lowly, unworthy monkeys would greatly appreciate it. My question is about stealth technology. I've heard you say this ship has a stealth field. And I've seen you detect other ships soon after we jump into an area. Don't those ships also have stealth? And how does a stealth field work? We have stealth jets on Earth."

  "Wow. Man, there isn't enough aspirin in the galaxy to fix the headache I'm going to get while trying to explain this to you. Fine. Listen hard, Mister Bigstupidhead, you might learn something. No, you do not have stealth jets on Earth. You have laughably crude pieces of metal that try to bounce radar waves in a different direction, instead of back to the radar receiver. Or you have coatings painted on your jets that try to absorb radar waves. That coating don't work so well when it's wet or dirty, by the way. And good luck to your Navy, trying to maintain delicate stealth coatings on aircraft in a corrosive salt spray environment. No, you do not have stealth technology. Your species has glanced the basic mechanics of stealth technology; you haven't been able to make it work yet."

  "Fine. What's the difference?"

  "A stealth field bends light waves around a ship. When a stealth field is working optimally, light flows right around an object as if it wasn't there. If a ship using stealth is between you and a star, all you will see is light from the star, the stealthed ship won't cast a shadow."

  "Cool. Is that why sometimes Ruhar or Kristang aircraft have a fuzzy outline, they're hard to see?"

  "Yes, exactly. Although using stealth in an atmosphere is almost not worth doing, any decent set of sensors can track how an aircraft disturbs the air around it, and the engines emit a heat signature that a blind man could see from a hundred miles. There is an important drawback to a stealth field, can you guess what it is?"

  Skippy played the annoying theme music from 'Jeopardy' while I thought furiously, trying to impress him with my monkey smarts. Light bent around the ship, radar waves bent around the ship, light- "Hey! If all the light bends around the ship, how can the ship see anything? It would be blind, right?"

  "Bing bing bing bing bing! We have a winner! That was pretty good, Joe. Yup. All light bends around the stealthed ship. A ship inside a stealth field might accidentally fly into, or too close to, a star, because the light from the star wouldn't contact the ship's sensors. Don't worry, a stealth field has intentional gaps that allow in enough light for detection."

  I looked at the display. "Huh. That's how we can still use the sensors when we're stealthed. Cool. But other ships use stealth, right, and you're able to detect them. Is that more amazing Skippy magic?"

  Skippy snorted. "Amazing magic to monkeys, sure. The answer is no, I make our sensors significantly more effective, however, the technology for active scanning is used by all star faring species, even dumdum lizards. Ships use an active sensor field, projected from the ship, to detect objects around them."

  "Wait just a minute. That doesn't make sense. Why would a ship in stealth, that is trying to hide, project something that gives away their position? Missiles could home in on the source of that field, and blow up the ship." Figuring that out made me feel pretty darned smart. My uncle Bob has a friend in the Navy, on a nuclear submarine, and one time at a cookout in my uncle's backyard, I listened in while the guy talked about what it's like to be in a steel tube under the waves. One thing he said is that real subs almost never use their 'active' sonar, sending out a sonar pulse ‘ping’ and listening for it bounce back. The whole point of a submarine is that it's quiet and it's underwater and nobody knows where it is. Sending out a sonar pulse is like shouting 'hey, look at me, I'm a dumbass, here I am'. Using active sonar invites a torpedo to follow the sonar waves back to the source, and sink the sub.

  "The sensor field isn't spherical, you dope," Skippy explained. "It has an irregular shape, and it constantly changes shape, and the field intensity varies throughout it, the field isn't strongest closer to the ship. To find the source of the field, a missile would need to first map the shape of the field, and calculate where it must be projected from. That would take way too long, and the field shape is constantly changing, there is no practical way to map it. When an object enters a ship's sensor field range, even if that object is stealthed, it will change the field's shape, that data feeds back to the source ship. Because the source ship knows what the shape and local density of the sensor field is supposed to be at any time, it can tell what object distorted the field. Where the object is, how fast it is moving and in what direction, an outline of the object, all that. It gets complicated during combat, of course, because ships try to distort other ships' sensor fields, in ways that mask who and where they truly are. Ships can even project sensor ghosts, distort or jam a sensor field and create a false reading. The big limitation to sensor fields, at this level of technology, is that they propagate at the speed of light, so they are painfully slow by the standards of space combat. By the time an object is detected and that data gets back to the source ship, the object will have moved in an unpredictable fashion. That makes long-range targeting difficult, even with speed of light weapons. You fire a maser or particle beam, and by the time the beam gets there, the target has moved."

  "Oh. Wow. A ship can dodge a maser beam. Cool."

  "Oh indeed. Are we done with kindergarten for the day? If you're good and take a nap now, I'll get you a juice box. Oy vey, I've got a headache. I need to lay down with a cold compress on my forehead."

  "No juice box needed. Could you do one more thing for me? Explain all that to our science team?"

  "Science team? You are referring to the group of marginally smarter monkeys? Oof, then my head would explode. Tell you what, I just forwarded a video recording of our conversation to their zPhones, they can watch it, and save me from having to explain it all over again."

  "Great, thank you, Skippy."

  "Don't mention it. Seriously, please, do not ever mention this again."

  Having gotten Skippy to smack some knowledge down on me, I was feeling pretty good about myself. This lasted less than three minutes. Skippy, true to his word, had forwarded a video of our conversation to the science team. And to everyone else on the ship. That was great. What was not so great was, that shithead little beer can had replaced my image in the video with a chimpanzee. Instead of me sitting in the command chair, it was a chimp, with my voice coming out of its mouth. And not just sitting in the chair, this chimp was swinging around the bridge, eating bananas, scratching itself, playing with its private parts, hooting and bouncing around the bridge, and other emb
arrassing things. My first notice that something had gone horribly wrong, was when people in the CIC began laughing uncontrollably while looking at their zPhones.

  Oy vey.

  Now I had a headache.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Before we made the final jump, to recon our first target of Skippy’s list of potential Elder sites, I wanted to speak to the crew, the entire crew

  "No chimp this time, Skippy, Ok? No replacing my image with a monkey, no matter what you think of us."

  "Agreed, Joe, that was only funny one time."

  "Thank you."

  It was a short speech, nothing inspirational, simply reminding everyone that we were about to jump into a star system that we, even Skippy, knew little about, and that we might be jumping away with no notice to the crew. The pilots had orders to initiate a short emergency jump on their own judgment, without waiting for the officer on duty in the bridge. It was a simple talk to the crew, that I did not intend to be anything memorable, but, Skippy had other ideas. I learned almost immediately what he had done after clicking the intercom button off. I learned about it, when Sergeant Adams forwarded a video recording of my speech to my zPhone.

  Crap. On the video feed to the rest of the ship, Skippy had replaced my image and voice, with Barney. Barney, the big stupid purple dinosaur. He hadn't only altered my voice; he'd changed some of my words. My speech didn't begin with 'This is Colonel Bishop', it began with 'Duh, hello, boys and girls', in classic moronic Barney tones. There I was, a big idiotic dinosaur, sitting in the command chair in my uniform, talking like I had an IQ of 30. Damn it, I hate that smug little beer can.

  On the other hand, everyone got a good laugh at my expense, so it was good for crew morale. “All right, all right,” I said with as much good nature as I could muster, “let’s focus, people, we have a jump in twenty minutes.”