"A gap?" Skippy asked. "I'm intrigued by whatever your dumdum monkey brain could possibly consider as a gap, go on."
"The problem is, there are other potential Elder sites closer to us, but those sites aren't close to a wormhole, so we can't get there, right?"
"Flawless logic with no gaps so far. You got it, Captain Obvious."
No way was I getting back to sleep now, so I pulled my boots on. "Tell me something, Captain Oblivious. We have our magic beanstalk, an Elder wormhole controller module, in a cargo bay, right? Are there any dormant wormholes you could open with the module, that would create a shorter path to a potential Elder site? Or could you connect a nearby wormhole, to a wormhole near some place we want to go, instead of where it connects to now?""
"Ho-leey shit," he said slowly.
"That wasn't exactly an answer, Skippy."
"Give me a moment, for crying out loud, I'm running through a ginormous data set here. Ginormous even for me. This could take a while."
Skippy's voice faded away, replaced by a rock and roll song.
"Skippy?" I was beginning to get worried. The music kept playing. "Skippy?!"
"Ooooooh, that was a lot of data. Hey, I used 37% of my capacity that time, a new record."
"What the hell was that?"
"Huh?"
"The music!"
"Oh, that was Don't Stop Believin' by Journey. I thought you'd be lonely while I was crunching numbers."
"Very thoughtful. You scared me. Don't do that again."
"You didn't like DJ Skippy-Skip and the Fresh Tunes? Hey, I'm bangin' out nothing but hits here, home boy."
I laughed, in spite of my recent anxiety. "Another time, maybe. You said crunched the numbers, and?"
"Oh, happy day. The answer is yes. Damn it, I am a dumbass. I should have thought of this idea. Shown up by a monkey, how humiliating. Damn it, now I'd be embarrassed to contact the Collective, they'd all laugh their asses off at me. There are two sites we should check out, less than a month away, if I reprogram an active wormhole, to connect to a wormhole that has been long dormant. Hmm. Problem is, I'll need to put the original wormhole back the way it was after we go through. Even then, somebody is going to notice there is something odd going on with wormholes in this sector."
"That is actually a bonus, Skippy. Then the wormhole near Earth will not be the only strange-acting wormhole, and that makes it look less suspicious. The Thuranin or Maxohlx or whoever can chase their tails trying to figure out what's going on, and take attention away from Earth."
"The Maxohlx are vaguely cat-like in appearance, but they do not have tails."
"It's an expression, Skippy."
"Oh. So noted. Hey, uh, Joe, we can, uh, keep this between us, right? No need for the whole crew to know that I missed something super obvious?"
I hit the door button and stepped into the hallway, attaching the zPhone earpiece. "Don't worry, your secret is safe with me, Skippy. In private, of course, I'm going to bust your balls about it every chance I get."
"I would expect nothing less. A new course has been loaded into the navigation system."
"Great. I'm going to the bridge, I'll notify the pilot."
When I got to the bridge, Sergeant Adams was the duty officer, sitting in the command chair. The two pilots, a French woman and a Chinese man, were relaxed in their couches, it appeared they were running a flight simulation. According to the main bridge display, the jump engines had a 22% charge, there wasn't anything for the pilots, duty officer or sensor team in the CIC to do for a long while. The Dutchman was hanging in deep interstellar space, 2.2 lightyears from the nearest star system, a red dwarf that was a dime a dozen in the galaxy, a star nobody would care about.
"Captain on the bridge!" Called out someone in the CIC behind me.
Adams turned the chair to face me. "Good morning, Captain," she said while rubbing on one of her fingernails with a frown.
I blinked and opened my mouth, unsure what to say. Before we left Earth orbit, I told the crew to dispense with saluting and most formal military protocol, we were all going to be stuck in a can together for months, possibly years. Adams not saluting me, therefore, was not a problem. What surprised me was seeing Sergeant Adams using nail polish, and apparently fussing over her nails. She hadn't been wearing nail polish when we first met, at the Kristang jail where she had been tortured and we were both scheduled to be executed. And we hadn't brought along any nail polish when we left Paradise. When we landed on Earth, after the first day, she'd been taken away for a medical checkup and debriefing, and I hadn't seen her again until the week before the Dutchman departed, a week in which everyone involved was frantically working 20 hour days to get the ship ready, and supplies loaded and stowed away. If she had nail polish then, or in the weeks since, I hadn't noticed. Most of the time I'd seen her, she'd been in the gym, or in the cargo holds we were using for training. Neither of those places were good opportunities for me to observe her personal grooming habits.
It wasn't that her wearing nail polish was a surprise, she was a woman, and women do that, even when they are tough as nails Marines. Maybe especially when a woman is a tough as nails Marine, she may feel a need to have something that is personal and feminine. I don't know, women are still a mystery to me. Adams is an attractive woman, if I can say that without being creepy as her commanding officer. When I first met her, and all the way back to Earth, her hair had been kept cropped very close, almost shaved. Now her hair was loose, wavy sort of Afro type curls on top, short on the sides, and she had kind of a, I guess it was a lightning bolt or stripe or something, shaved into the right side. Also, when I'd first met her, busting her out of a Kristang jail, her naked back had been scarred from torture. We had never talked about how she had been abused by the Kristang, if she didn't want to talk about it, I wasn't going to push her. What I had seen was that she'd been in pain when working out in the gym then, and she'd worn loose-fitting clothes. A couple days ago, I'd seen her in the gym, wearing shorts and a tank top, and there were no scars on her skin. Dr. Skippy had taken care of her scars on the outside, Marine Corps doctors had cleared her to return to the Dutchman, telling me they were satisfied with her scars on the inside.
I raised my eyebrows and glanced at her nails. "Red? Is that official Marine Corps red, Adams?" I knew she was a bit self-conscious about being the only United States Marine aboard the ship.
She laughed. "No, sir, this is a more of a coral red. The rest of me belongs to the Corps, this is for me. I just did my nails this morning, and I chipped this one already."
"Looks good." I didn’t know what else to say. "How are we doing?" As the captain, I probably should have been more formal, requesting a sitrep or ship status, this is what happens when an Army infantry grunt gets put in command of a ship. The Army has boats, not ships.
She pointed at the display. "The last jump was successful, no unfriendlies detected. An hour ago, we went through a molecular hydrogen cloud, Skippy said the density was something like 3 million atoms per cubic centimeter, and that's unusual. No effect on the ship. That was our big excitement for the evening."
Skippy's voice interrupted excitedly. "Also, the gas cloud was 98% hydrogen and less than 2 percent helium, that is highly unusual in the interstellar medium. Typically, cool, dense areas of the ISM are comprised of-"
"Science team, Skippy, please discuss that with the science team." I said while rolling my eyes, and Adams smiled.
"Sure, if you enjoy being ignorant-"
"Skippy, I'm not embracing ignorance, and I'm not blowing you off. If you find this interesting, with your vast knowledge of the galaxy, then our science team will definitely be interested. I could listen to you, but I couldn't appreciate it the way the science team will."
"Oh. I did think you were blowing me off. All right, I'll discuss this with the smarter monkeys."
"Thank you, Skippy. Sergeant Adams, I'm here to liven up your evening, you are the first to hear this. Skippy has rerun calculations of an
optimal search pattern, and we will be able to cut months off the schedule." The two pilots had turned in their chair while Adams and I were talking, they both looked surprised to hear the news. "Skippy, is the new course loaded into the autopilot?"
"Affirmative," Skippy confirmed, "it is labelled jump option Delta."
"New calculations?" Adams asked, with her own raised eyebrow. She knew Skippy well enough to figure there was more to the story. She also knew not to ask.
"A different approach, based on recently discovered information," I explained. The information Skippy had discovered recently, was me giving him an idea he should have thought of himself. That could stay between us. "I'll explain more in the staff meeting," a meeting that was the bane of my existence; we had a meeting of team leaders, every other day, this required me to think of something new to say every other day. Something new to say, on a ship where one day cruising through interstellar space was like the day before, and the next.
"Aye, aye, Captain, we'll engage the new course when we jump next." Adams acknowledged. "The jump coils will be fully charged in," she glanced at the main display, "one hour and thirty seven minutes."
"Great. I'm going to get coffee." Otherwise, I was going to fall back asleep.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Skippy was super, extra mega excited about the next site on his list, it was the location that he thought was almost certain to contain an Elder site. What interested me was this system was centered on a class K orange star, about half the size of Earth's sun, it wasn't just another too-common red dwarf. Skippy was fairly bursting with confidence, because this star system, with its location in the Orion Spur near De Mairan's Nebula, was perfectly situated for an Elder communications node, because of invisible force lines in the galaxy, or some sciency BS like that Skippy had made a futile attempt to explain to me.
We found the star system. We did not find any sign of an Elder facility, or any sign an Elder facility had ever been there. After four days of intensive scanning, Skippy was frustrated and sounded depressed. "This makes absolutely zero freakin' sense. Zero! I've proved that my model for predicting unknown Elder sites is valid. If any place should have an Elder site, it's this star system. I do not understand this, at all. A moon orbiting this gas giant is the perfect place. There should be an Elder facility here.
"Should we keep looking, Skippy? Maybe there is another Elder facility somewhere else in this system."
"Unlikely," he said sourly, disappointment clear in his voice. "Oh, what the hell, sure, why not. Maybe there's some unknown minor factor that I'm not taking into account. Do you mind if we take the ship around the system for a week or so, I want to make some very detailed sensor readings?"
"We'll go wherever you want, Skippy."
"Really?" He sounded surprised.
"Yeah, duh, you lunkhead. The whole reason we're out here is to find your magic freakin' radio. We'll go wherever you think we need to go. Within reason, I'm not endangering the crew without a damned good reason, you know that. You want the Dutchman to hop around this system a couple days?"
"Five days, a week at the most."
"No problem. This will be a good opportunity for training. You Ok if we program some of the jumps?"
He sighed. "Ugh. In that case, better plan on ten days, because we'll be so off target on every jump. You monkeys are lucky to hit the correct star system."
With the Flying Dutchman making short hops around the star system, the crew took the opportunity for extensive training that we couldn't do while the ship was traveling between stars. Pilots had fun flying dropships, flying the Flower in simulated combat, and programming jumps on our own. We were getting somewhat better at our jump accuracy, despite Skippy's constant mocking and complaining. The science team, when not examining the sensor data Skippy was collecting, was also busy training, mostly their training involved how to use space suits without killing themselves. They also went through familiarization with ship systems they wouldn't normally have contact with, such as the sensor and weapons controls in the Combat Information Center. While I was duty officer on the bridge, three scientists got a tour of the CIC. It was a slow time for the bridge and CIC crews; all dropships were safely tucked into their landing bays, and the Flower was attached to its platform for maintenance. There were not any crew outside the ship practicing space walks, and we weren't scheduled to jump again for another three hours. Sitting in the command chair, I was taking a quiz about the flight controls on a Thuranin dropship, and hoping there would be good stuff left over for lunch when my shift ended at 1400 hours.
One of the scientist, a Doctor Zheng, wandered away from the CIC and into the bridge. Sergeant Adams hurried over to shoo her away from me, but I signaled to Adams that I was fine with Zheng being there.
"Doctor Zheng, are you enjoying the tour?" I asked. She was a biologist and medical doctor, the ship's controls might have been less interesting to her than to others on the science team.
"It is good to get out of the lab," she said with a smile. "So far, the only places we've been to have been an abandoned space station, and some airless moons. There has not been much for a biologist to do. I've been helping Major Simms in the hydroponics hold." Before we left Earth, Simms had brought aboard an experimental hydroponics set up, I think it was something NASA had been playing with. We were growing fresh vegetables and fruit using hydroponics, our first crop of spinach had been served in a salad two days ago. "When we came out here, I had hoped for greater opportunities to study alien biospheres."
Damn. One thing I was not in the mood for right then was an uncomfortable conversation. "Doctor, I did explain our situation, our mission, before we left orbit," I said gently, wishing to avoid an argument. Plus, I could empathize with her, she was bored, with few prospects of pursuing her life's work. "In fact, I argued against including a science team. You are not essential to the mission, and you are putting your lives at great risk being out here. As I told everyone who applied for the mission, it is unlikely, highly unlikely, that we will ever return to Earth. Even if the mission is concluded successfully, the ship could be stranded in deep space."
"If Skippy leaves us?"
"Yes," I said simply.
"Would you really do it?" She pointed to the self-destruct button on the left arm of the captain's chair, under its clear plastic protective cover with 'SELF DESTRUCT' in large red letters. To press the button, the duty officer needed to turn a lever that held the clear plastic cover down, flip the cover back out of the way, press the button once to activate, then hold the button down to confirm. At the same time, another officer in the CIC needed to do the same to the self-destruct button there, as a precaution against accidents, or somebody going crazy. Precautions were all fine ideas, and assuring to the crew, in reality Skippy wouldn't allow the nukes to detonate unless I ordered them to explode, and Skippy agreed. "Would you destroy the ship, if we were stranded? Or if aliens were going to board the ship and learn humans are out here?"
"I'd do it without hesitation." I said grimly.
Her raised eyebrows told me I'd surprised her, and not in a good way. "That's-"
"Without hesitation, because if I took time to think about it, I might not do it." I added. "Army training is damned good, it not only trains you for what to do, it trains you to do it no matter what the conditions. Trains you to do what you have to, even when you're tired, and you're hungry, and you're injured, and people are shooting at you. You've seen soldiers taking apart their weapons, and putting them back together, over and over, blindfolded?"
She nodded.
"We do that so the action is in our muscle memory, and we don't have to think about it. Like tying your shoes. You don't really need to think about it, right, you've done it so many times that your fingers know what to do?"
"I never thought about it like that."
"I am not going to self-destruct the ship unless we absolutely have to. If we have to, I will do it. We can't allow our actions out here to put Earth at risk." I coul
d see my little speech hadn't help her mood any, so I added "One thing I can tell you, Doctor, is that anything can happen out here. You may very well get an opportunity to study alien biology, first hand."
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 15
