SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  I took a quick bathroom break, and used it as an opportunity to speak with Skippy in private. "Skippy, about that Barney video-"

  "Funny, huh? The crew loved it."

  "Yeah, hey, you know, there were other characters painted on the side of that ice cream truck. Why don't you show me as Ironman or-"

  "The Smurfs?"

  I'd forgotten about the Smurfs.

  "Not the Sm-"

  "The only one people remember is Barney."

  "All right," I was tired of fighting about it, "fine, Barney. This is another case where it's only funny once, you understand that, right?"

  "You sure about that?"

  "Pretty sure, yeah."

  "Uh oh. Hmm.”

  Crap, I thought. "What did you do?"

  "I can neither confirm or deny, but, somebody whose name rhymes with, let's say, 'Stippy', may have left behind a virus that altered your image, on all the video recordings of your intelligence debriefings in Colorado Springs. That virus may have taken effect after we left Earth."

  Great. Just great. "Some guy named Stippy, huh?"

  "Yup. You should never trust him, that guy's a real asshole."

  The jump in was uneventful, Skippy declared within five minutes that we were alone in the star system. Fifteen minutes later, the crew monitoring sensors in the Combat Information Center agreed, and I ordered the ship to stand down from battle stations. Then we began the painstaking process of searching for an Elder site. The star system, centered on an unremarkable red dwarf star, had one smallish gas giant planet, about the size of Neptune. Skippy thought the most likely place for the Elders to have located a facility, was on a rocky moon orbiting the gas giant. Quickly, the ship’s sensors identified three large and two small rocky moons, plus two more that were covered in ice. Skippy warned that locating an Elder site could take considerable time, as the Elders may have partially hidden it, and most of the facility could be buried deep under the surface.

  He was wrong. “Ah, damn it, found it,” he announced, sounding disgusted. “It’s on the second largest moon, on top of a plateau. Whatever its purpose, the Elders didn’t make any attempt to hide it. And somebody has already been there, there’s debris scattered around the site and the surface is disturbed from where dropships landed. Crap! We are way too late. Some hooligans already ransacked the place.”

  Hooligans? I wondered where Skippy picked up his slang. “Sorry, Skippy, but, hey, this is not a failure. I think this is great, we proved your model for locating unmapped Elder sites is correct, and we didn't encounter any hostiles when we jumped in, or take a risk checking the place out. This is the first place we've looked; did you really think we'd hit the jackpot the very first time?"

  "It would have been nice," he grumbled. Then sighed, I wondered how Skippy decided when to fake a sigh, since he didn’t actually breathe. "You're right, you're right. This does prove I know how to locate Elder sites that are not known to the Thuranin or the Jeraptha, or at least not in databases I have access to. Anything useful was probably taken from this site a long, long time ago. Joe, when you've been waiting as long as I have, it is frustrating to get all the way here, and find some jerk has looted the place."

  “Is it worth going down there anyway, to check it out?” With this star system apparently uninhabited, I wanted to take advantage of an excellent opportunity for training. Our pilots could practice flying dropships down to the surface of the moon and back, and soldiers could gain experience using suits on the mood, in low gravity. Partly because I felt bad about denying the science team more time at the abandoned space station, I wanted the science team to also be able to get away from ship, go down to the moon, and poke around in an Elder site. Even if the site had, as Skippy feared, been stripped of anything valuable, the science team could learn what an Elder site looked like, get used to it, so if we found an unmolested site, the team would not waste time with sightseeing and marveling at the novelty of it.

  “Sure, what the hell, why not? It’s possible that the hooligans who vandalized the place were only looking for weapons, or something they could sell to buy drugs,” he said bitterly, “they might not have recognized a comm node as anything valuable. It would be good for you monkeys to get the sightseeing over with here anyway, when we do find a site that hasn’t been screwed with, I don’t want to waste time with you monkeys taking selfies and crap like that.”

  “My thoughts exactly, Skippy,” I agreed.

  "Colonel Chang," I turned the chair to look into the CIC, "how about you take the Chinese team, and the Indians," those two teams were currently at the top of a randomly-chosen rotation, "and a scientist down there, recon the site, see if the looters left anything useful? If not, we at least gain experience using suits on the surface of an airless world."

  "Yes, sir," he responded eagerly.

  "Captain Desai," I turned back face the front of the bridge compartment, "if flying a mere dropship is not too boring compared to a starship, would you like to ferry Colonel Chang's team down for some sightseeing?"

  "Oh, I think I can manage it, sir," she said with a wide grin, sliding out of the pilot couch.

  Desai set the dropship down carefully, half a kilometer from the largest building of the Elder site, and Chang took first three people over to the site, then called in others. It wasn't easy for me to resist the temptation to micromanage the landing party from orbit, so I pretended to a calm I didn't feel and went to my office, to give Major Simms more time in the command chair. And to let Chang and Desai make decisions on their own. After an hour, I couldn't stand it any longer, and returned to the bridge. Simms stepped back to her duty station in the CIC. Right away, I noticed something odd on the main bridge display, a sensor analysis that depicted the gas giant planet was surrounded by a loose cloud. "Major Simms, what is that?"

  "We have been practicing using the sensors, sir, Skippy wanted sensors to scan the orbit around the planet, we've been trying to see if we can get the same readings from the data as he does. There is some kind of atmospheric gas surrounding the planet."

  "Good idea," I said, we shouldn't rely on Skippy for everything. "What is so interesting about this space gas, Skippy?"

  “Joe, I’ve found something odd," Skippy said, in a voice that I associated with my high school science teacher. "There is a measurable part of the planet’s atmosphere in orbit.”

  “You mean, higher than it should be?”

  “Yes, these gases are not technically part of the atmosphere now, however, from the ratio of elements in the orbiting gases, I can tell they came from the planet, they aren’t something ejected by a volcanic eruption on one of the moons. Except, hmm, that is odd.”

  “What?’” Truthfully, right then I did not much care what scientific oddity Skippy had discovered about a small gas giant planet, orbiting a dull red dwarf star, a long way from Earth. On the other hand, I did not want to insult Skippy by being openly disinterested. “What’s odd about it?”

  “The chemical elements that are missing.”

  “Uh, can you be more specific?” Trying to feign interest, I was about to suggest that he discuss this with the science team, rather than me. “This planet is missing some type of gas, that, uh, gas giants normally have?” In a flash of insight, I asked “Is that because this planet is small, for a gas giant? Hey, is there a special name for a gas planet that isn’t a giant? Do we call it a gas normal, something like that?”

  “We don’t- “

  “If the planet was much smaller, it couldn’t be made of gas, right? The gravity would be too low to contain the gas, and it would escape into space, be boiled off by the solar wind?” Man, I was proud of myself for thinking that on my own, I remembered reading that the reason the atmosphere of Mars was so thin, was that most of it had been blown away by the Sun’s solar wind over millions of years.

  “Yes, that is both correct, and irrelevant to the current situation,” he said. “This planet has a normal distribution of gases, for a planet of this size, conside
ring the gaseous composition of its star. The odd part, which I was about to tell you before you side tracked me with your moronic speculation on a subject you know zero about, is that there are gases present in the planet’s atmosphere, that are almost entirely missing from the cloud of gases enveloping the planet in low orbit. For example, and most telling, helium 3.”

  Moronic? Now I was insulted, and figured this was a challenge. “Well, uh, some elements are lighter, and so those would have been pushed out of orbit by the solar wind here? And the heavy gases would have fallen back into the atmosphere.”

  “Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Here’s a quote I read, from a smart monkey: 'it is better to remain silent and be thought an idiot, than to speak and remove all doubt'.”

  “Oh, that’s hilarious, you shithead.”

  “Me a shithead? You’ve been giving me guesses that are about on the level of astrology in terms of scientific relevance. If you will please, shut your pie hole for a moment, I will smack some actual, useful knowledge on you. Knowledge that, as the commander of this mission, and man, every time you open your mouth, I realize what a gargantuan mistake that was to put you in command of anything more important that a lemonade stand, you should be interested to hear, because it represents a potential threat to the ship.”

  “Shutting up now,” I said in all seriousness.

  “Great. Finally. Planets that are surrounded by an orbiting mixture of atmospheric gases are not unusual, I have seen them many times before. It is not the fact that this planet is surrounded by escaped gases that is interesting, what is interesting is why those gases are likely there. My guess, and when I make a guess it is based on solid data and rational analysis, unlike the idiotic BS that comes out of your mouth, my guess is that those gases are in orbit because they were pulled up in the process of ships extracting useful gases from the atmosphere. Starships use gas giant planets as a supply of elements for fuel, reaction mass, and other purposes, depending on the technology of the ships involved.”

  “Holy crap!” I gasped. “You’re telling me this damned planet is a gas station?”

  “Sort of, yes. Not the sort of gas station that has a convenience store where you can buy Slurpees and week-old hot dogs. Maybe, it is more of an inconvenience store, where you have to make everything from the basic elements. But yes, the sensor data points to this planet having been used to extract starship fuel, in the past.”

  “Past, like, yesterday, or like, a million years ago?” I asked anxiously. To Skippy, who had existed possibly for millions of years, time had a totally different meaning than it did for modern-day humans, who measure time mostly in terms of TV show seasons.

  “That is difficult to tell, even for me, Joe. We don’t have enough long-term data about this star system, for me to accurately forecast timelines.”

  “Give me a wild guess, was it more or less than a thousand years ago?”

  “Oh, in that case, less. Not yesterday, either. Maybe, within the last year. Or, hmm, I’m running an extrapolation here, maybe, more like within the last month, based on dispersement of the waste gases. Possibly less than a month, there is a whole lot of waste gas in orbit here. And, while this star is nothing special, it is conveniently located between two wormhole clusters, so it is a particularly good candidate as a frequently-used refueling stop.”

  “Do we need to get out of here immediately, or not?”

  “That, Joe, is a judgment call you need to make."

  “Crap.” All decisions, ultimately, fell to the commander. “Damn it. Major Simms, recall the landing party. Right now. Get them back to the dropship and off the surface, as soon as possible, and tell them I do not care what interesting sciency stuff they are doing down there. Pilot, Skippy, I need jump options to get the Dutchman out of here, if needed.”

  Through the glass wall, I could see Simms talking into her microphone, she was shaking her head, then she looked at me. "Sir, Captain Desai reports that her dropship is forty kilometers from the main site, she landed there so four people could check out some outbuildings. She has recalled the second landing party, and estimates she can retrieve those people and be headed back to the main site in twenty five minutes. Colonel Chang told her it will take forty minutes for his team to reach the evac site, he has some people down in an access shaft far beneath the surface, they think they may have found a section of the base that has not been looted."

  "Damn it. While I commend Chang's initiative, his timing is less than optimal. All right, signal Desai and Chang to move as quickly as they can do so safely, I don't want someone getting into an accident, and this becoming a rescue operation."

  "Yes, sir." Simms acknowledged.

  Adams stepped around the corner from the CIC to talk with me. "We're bugging out of this system already, sir?"

  What she didn't say, and I could see in her eyes, was that here we had a confirmed Elder site, which we had not fully explored, and that perhaps we were being hasty about abandoning it just because of some gas floating above the planet. Another potential Elder site might not be any better, and we'd be wasting this opportunity. "No, we're not leaving, not yet. What we are doing is picking up our landing party so they won't be left behind if we have to jump out of here. I let a large party go down there, partly to gain experience, on the assumption this star system was safe, uninhabited. Now we learn that this system may be a high traffic area, because the planet below us is a gas station. We're going to pull back, and assess the data. If the risk looks manageable, we will figure out a better way to explore the site, with multiple options for quick evac." Looking back, it might have been foolhardy of me to use an Elder site as an opportunity to give people experience in armor suits on the surface of an airless moon. With both sides of the war dedicating ships to searching for Elder sites, I should have selected a less important place for training. What I should have done is ask Skippy to suggest a completely uninteresting star system, and take the ship there for a dedicated week of training. Extending the mission by a week would be a small price to pay, for having pilots with experience landing dropships, and soldiers and scientists gaining experience walking around and working in Kristang space suits. This situation needed to be added to my list of opportunities for me to learn from.

  Adams nodded slowly, looking at me carefully. She still thought of me as a buck sergeant, and her instincts as an experienced staff sergeant were to offer me gentle, nudging guidance in what she considered the right direction. I knew what she was thinking; that I was so inexperienced as a commander, I was afraid to take even reasonable risks. "Yes, sir."

  Maybe I was being hasty, too risk averse. The four people in Desai's secondary landing party, who had been checking out structures away from the main Elder base, were almost back to the dropship, I was watching a video feed from the dropship. Four people, carefully loping across the rocky surface of the moon, kicking up puffs of dust as they walked, bouncing lightly. Damn, I envied them. Even though I had trained in a suit, trained in zero gravity, low gravity, high gravity, in vacuum and simulated thick atmosphere, all the training had taken place aboard the Dutchman. I wanted to walk on the surface of a real moon, I wanted to feel like an astronaut. There I was, commander of a starship, and at the moment, I envied three Indian soldiers and one Australian scientist, who were striding confidently back to the-

  “Uh oh! Joe, jump option Echo, right now. Now!” Skippy shouted.

  I nodded to the pilot, and she pressed the proper button. In a flash, the Flying Dutchman moved, the image on the main bridge display changed from the surface of a moon, to the cloud tops of the gas giant. Cloud tops, as in, it looked like we could reach out and touch them. “Where are we?” I asked, alarmed. "What happened?"

  “Don’t worry, Joe, we’re safely above the atmosphere despite what it looks like, we jumped into an area with an intense magnetic field, and I’ve engaged stealth. Two Kristang ships jumped in near the planet, we were on the other side of the moon, I believe we jumped quickly
enough that they did not detect the gamma ray signature of our jump out. We’re now over the planet’s horizon, that should have shielded our jump in from being seen also. The Kristang, overall, have crappy sensors on their ships, they have concentrated on upgrading weapons technology at the expense of sensors, which is a mistake the stupid lizards have been making for a very long time, they never learn. Hmm, two more Kristang ships have jumped in. Two, three, five more. That’s seven Kristang ships, a typical task force."

  "What type of ships?"

  "It looks like, I'm checking the data as it comes in, one battlecruiser, two cruisers, two destroyers, a troop transport and a support ship."

  “Can they see us?”

  “No. No way, Joe. Our Thuranin stealth field, plus my own awesome enhancements, are quite effectively shielding us from the laughably useless sensors the lizards have. We are also encased in the planet’s magnetic field, which distorts the sensor fields of the Kristang. So, no, they do not know we are here.”

  “What about the landing party? Have the Kristang seen them?”

  “No, not that I am able to determine from Kristang ship to ship transmissions, the lizards do not appear to have any interest in the Elder site, that confirms my suspicion that multiple species have picked over that site, over many years. Just before we jumped, I signaled the landing party that enemy ships are in system, Captain Desai will have detected their inbound jump signatures. I am sure she has engaged the dropship’s stealth field and maintained communications security, and that Colonel Chang has concealed his team within the Elder facility. Our sensors are no longer able to detect the dropship, which leads me to believe it is effectively stealthed. Unless either Desai or Chang break discipline, something that would greatly surprise me, even given what little I know of them, the Kristang will not learn of their presence on the surface there.”

  Relieved for the moment, I took in a deep breath and let it out slowly, like a yoga thing, except that I’d never taken a yoga class. My sister had been big into yoga for a while. “Fine, great. The critical factor, then, is, how much oxygen does the landing party have?”