SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  "Unless the Thuranin take time to scan the debris field and find me, and decide to take me aboard. It's not any worse than me getting flung away in an escape pod, right before you nuke the Dutchman, so although it sucks, there's really no additional downside for me."

  I stopped walking. "Yeah there is. Your plan sucks, Skippy." I turned around set him down on the floor of the elevator. Although when the elevator moved, he was going to fall on his side and roll around like a beer can, he would be safe.

  "What are you doing, you dumb ape, we don't have time for this!" Skippy shouted.

  "What I'm doing is plan C. I will stay aboard the Flower and let the Thuranin chase me, you do the rest of the stuff you said; distorting the wormhole, making the Flower's drive signature look like the Dutchman's, all that. You get my crew away from here." I knew enough of the Flower's flight control systems to manage a short flight with pre-programmed jumps, and a short flight was all it was going to be.

  "Plan C is a stupid plan! Here's how you automatically know it's stupid; a monkey thought of it."

  "Skippy," I took a deep breath to collect my thoughts, we didn't have a lot of time. "I'm not going to let you drift in space until the end of time, you've had enough loneliness for a thousand lifetimes. We humans owe you, big time, more than we can ever repay. And, damn it you little shithead, you're my, I can't believe I'm saying this, you're my friend." I hit the button to send the elevator back down.

  "Wait!" The elevator door froze halfway closed. "Wait wait! Joe, you're going to do this, for me?"

  "Somebody has to, Skippy, and I'm the one here right now." I hit the button again and the door slid an inch more toward closing. "Take care of my ship."

  "Wait! Joe, I," his voice faded. "You know my memories aren't complete. I know they're not complete. Maybe they're not even real. But, I'm pretty sure that I never had a friend before. Never thought my first real friend would be a freakin’ monkey," he finished with a disgusted grumble. "No, you know what? To hell with this. SCREW! THIS!” His voice was loud enough to hurt my ears. “Bring me back to the Dutchman's bridge, I'm going to find us a way out of this. Time for me to use this ginormous damn brain I have. Joe, come on, move, I'm going silent for a bit. Please trust me."

  Whatever Skippy was doing in there, and in whatever other spacetimes he occupied, the beer can was growing uncomfortably warm to the touch, I had to shift him from one hand to the other as I carried him back to the bridge

  Everyone stared at me in shock. With a glance, I took in what I needed to know of our status; the jump drive held only a twenty eight percent charge, the process of calibrating the remaining jump drive coils was only thirty one percent complete, but there were no other ships in detection range.

  "What happened?" Chang asked, while unbuckling from the command chair.

  "Skippy has a new plan. Right, Skippy?" I set him in the receptacle we'd attached to the floor of the bridge, in a cramped corner. "A better plan," I said as I buckled into the command chair. "Skippy? Skippy? Come on, Skippy."

  "I didn't say it was a better plan. It's a different plan. It's too late now for my original plan, thanks to you, Joe."

  “What was Mr. Skippy’s original plan?” Chang demanded. He was standing next to the command chair, someone else had taken his station in the CIC.

  “I was going to heroically sacrifice myself for you lesser beings," Skippy explained. "Joe stopped me, because I would be an incalculable loss to the galaxy.”

  “Yeah, that’s why,” I snorted. “That, and the fact it was a stupid plan.”

  “It wasn’t stupid! You had a twelve percent chance to escape!”

  “Is that twelve, Skippy, or ‘meh’ twelve?”

  “Eleven point five six four nine two, roughly. Close enough. Ok, that may have been somewhat optimistic. But at least seven percent, for sure.”

  "Yeah, I figured that. Tell you your new genius plan."

  "That's the thing, Joe, I don't have a genius plan. I searched for records of ships that had escaped from similar situations, and there were none. Then I used my incredible brainpower to dream up a genius plan. And I got nothing. Nothing! No matter how I approached the situation, no matter how many variables I plugged in, I couldn't come up with any smart way out of this. So, I realized what we need is a stupid plan. And I have a stupid plan. Joe, even a monkey will think this plan is stupid. If this plan works, the Dutchman can escape."

  “And if it doesn’t work?”

  “The Dutchman will be incinerated.”

  “That’s not great.”

  “Hey, if this plan fails, you monkeys will simply be dead. I’ll be trapped in the core of a dying star for trillions and trillions of years.”

  “Oh, hey, bonus. Why didn’t you say that first? Sign me up. What are the odds of this plan succeeding?”

  “Meh, probably somewhere south of fifty-fifty, maybe? I truly do not know. Nothing this stupid has ever been tried before in this galaxy. It’s kind of exciting.”

  “This stupid? Like, rednecks-on-TV stupid?” I asked.

  "Nothing is as stupid as that, Joe, but for an AI like me, this approaches hold-my-beer-watch-this stupid.”

  I shook my head. “Skippy, you need to do a better job selling your ideas.”

  “Selling? Think about this, Joe, this could be your one big chance to achieve Florida man status.”

  “Florida?” I asked, puzzled, “I’m from Maine, dumbass.”

  “No,” he said with an exasperated sigh, “I mean the classic Florida Man, like in the headlines. You know, ‘Florida man eaten by pet alligator’, or “Florida man, drunk, crashes car into police station’, or ‘Florida man, naked, runs-”

  “We get the idea, Skippy. Fine, what are our odds without this plan?”

  “Zero. That’s not a ’meh’ zero, it is zee-roh, Joe. By my estimate, we have at most one minute before the first Thuranin ship jumps in and detects us."

  The display told me the jump engines now had barely a thirty percent charge. "Fine, great. Explain your pla-"

  "Enemy ship jumped in!" Chang shouted. An angry triangle symbol was now on the display, far enough away that we should be able to dodge most of its particle beam shots, too close for comfort.

  "We jump away now, Skippy?" I asked anxiously. Maybe I should have left him in the elevator and taken the Flower out myself as a decoy.

  "No, Joe, jumping away now would be the smart thing to do. The smart thing to do has a zero chance of success, as I explained. Trust me, you will be awed by my stupidity."

  We started Skippy's stupid plan with waiting another thirty five seconds, until three of the Thuranin destroyers jumped in, locked onto us with their sensor fields, and began firing missiles and particle beams. We waited, even though we could have managed a short jump away, with a thirty percent jump engine charge. We almost cut it too close, particle beams knocked back our shields, and a missile got so close that fragments of its warhead hit one of our remaining functional reactors, and that reactor became less functional. Like, not at all.

  When we finally did jump away, the word 'jump' was accurate but 'away' was not. A key stupidity in Skippy's stupid plan was jumping toward, not away from the star. By toward, I mean we jumped in close. Close enough that, if I could live on a star, I could see my house. Close enough that, deep as we now were in the star's gravity well, jumping back out would be difficult, even for a ship with a full charge, a healthy set of coils, and a calibrated jump system. We didn't have any of those three critical assets. Jumping in close to the star, close enough that we needed our shields just to keep the ship from being fried, wasn't stupid enough for Skippy. As soon as we emerged from the jump point, we set course straight for the star and kicked the ship's tail, accelerated at maximum thrust, deeper into the gravity well. This was Skippy's hold-my-beer-watch-this moment.

  The whole maneuver was sufficiently stupid that when the Thuranin destroyers jumped in behind us, they hesitated to follow us in. For a minute, they spread out and tried to hit us
from long distance. There was so much interference from the star's hellish magnetic field that their own networked sensor fields couldn't target us. One of the little green men must have made a decision after their particle beams all missed, and their missiles went off course, because the destroyers turned at the same time and burned hard in after us.

  Here's the thing; star carriers can jump long distances, and jump again and again. That makes star carriers seem fast. They are not fast. What a star carrier can do is keep going, long after other ships have run out of charge or burned out their jump drive coils. In normal space, a star carrier handles like a big cruise ship, and the destroyers were like speedboats. A cruise ship can cross an ocean and leave any speedboats far behind after a while; over any short distance, a speedboat will run rings around a cruise ship. What this means is those destroyers gained on us quickly. Very quickly. To see how quickly they were closing the distance, I didn't need to look at the rapidly decreasing 'Range to Target' section of the main bridge display, I only needed to watch the triangle symbols of those five warships. Those triangles were swiftly moving across the display as I watched. In front of us on the display was the star, so close that the surface of the star was a straight line, not a curve at all. "Uh, Skippy, those ships are going to be on top of us in," now I did check the Estimated Time to Closure section of the display, "seven minutes. We can't jump away this close to a star, and those destroyers are going to pound us to dust. If this is the stupid part of your plan, I don't want to see any more."

  "Joe, I promise, you ain't see stupid yet. Watch this."

  In front of us on the display, the surface of the star was no longer a straight line, it had a distinct indent to the surface, like an invisible knife was pushing into it. The dent widened and grew deeper, so deep the display had to zoom outward. Holy shit, he was making a giant hole in the star. "I'm distorting spacetime," Skippy explained, "when I release the effect, that hole in the star is going to collapse and cause a massive solar flare. Like, a historic, holy-shit size solar flare. One way or the other, this will be majorly interesting."

  "A solar flare that will incinerate the Dutchman?" The Thuranin destroyer squadron had seen the danger, they had turned around and were now burning at maximum thrust to get away from the star.

  "Mmm, shmaybe. The really stupid part starts now. No one has ever tried this before, so hang on."

  Skippy released the spacetime distortion of the star. On the display, the surface of the star rippled as it filled in the gap, then the surface erupted outward. Toward us. Fast.

  "Skippy!" I shouted. The ship rocked.

  "The star is collapsing; those are gravity waves hitting us at lightspeed. Jump option Zulu!" Skippy shouted back. "Now!"

  How the hell were we supposed to jump so deep in a gravity well? The display showed the front edge of the enormous solar flare had almost engulfed us. There was no time to argue. "Pilot! Engage jump option Zulu," I ordered in as calm a voice as I could manage. If this didn't work, at least we wouldn't need nukes to vaporize any trace of evidence that humans were roaming the galaxy.

  In front of me, Desai pressed the button to initiate the selected jump. Whatever Skippy was doing, the jump drive didn't like it, the whole ship flickered in and out of existence in my vision and shook violently. Displays went dark and some exploded, sending showers of sparks cascading through the bridge and CIC. The artificial gravity clicked off, then on heavily, then off again. I was flung around in the chair so viciously it seemed my neck would snap. There was a terribly deep wailing, moaning sound that grew louder and louder until my ears hurt, the lights went out-

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Regaining consciousness, for me, was the sort of thing where you fall into bed outrageously drunk, the bed starts spinning and you snap awake because you're going to hurl the contents of your stomach onto the bed. Oh, right, sure, that's never happened to you? Liar. In this case, I awoke while I was puking into my own lap, or trying to, some chunks hung briefly in the air as the artificial gravity was off, then on, then off again. The intermittent zero gee was making my stomach flutter, I clamped my mouth shut so if I puked again, I wouldn't spew it all over the bridge. And a headache, my head throbbed so bad it felt like my eyeballs would explode. "Skippy," I heard myself saying in a strangled voice. "Sitrep," was all I could manage to say at that moment.

  "We have jumped past the edge of the star system. All five Thuranin destroyers were engulfed by the solar flare, there are no ships pursuing us currently. Artificial gravity has stabilized temporarily. There are numerous injuries to the crew, nothing serious." He didn't explain his definition of a 'serious' injury. "Damage to the ship is substantial."

  "How bad is it?" I was afraid to hear the answer.

  "Extremely, catastrophically bad. Shut up and let me talk for a minute." Skippy's voice was flat, none of the usual snarkiness. "Only reactors One and Five are online, I have initiated an emergency shut down of reactor Five because it's losing containment. As it is, the leak will result in additional damage to reactor Three, which is already shut down. Reactor One has a slight loss of containment, the major problem with One is that it has almost completely lost cooling capacity, temperatures are in the red and if they continue to increase, and they will, there will be a catastrophic explosion that could destroy the aft part of the ship, including the remaining jump drives. Reactor One's coolant pump is making a sound like if you put a pack of hyenas in a blender, only louder. Therefore, I am shutting down reactor One also."

  "The problem is a pump?" Seemed simple to me. "Can you fix it?"

  "I called the 1-800 help line for the pump manufacturer, they transferred me to some guy named 'Bob' in Malaysia, the monsoon rain was pounding on his roof so bad I could barely hear him. He asked me to verify the pump was plugged in, then he suggested I turn it off, and back on again. That didn't help. Also, I'm pretty sure 'Bob' is not his real name. Joe, for crying out loud, if I could fix the pump, don't you think I would have done it already? The pump isn't the only problem, the whole cooling system got peppered with shrapnel from a near-miss."

  "The ship will completely lose pow-" I started to ask.

  "I requested you to shut up while I'm talking, like that was ever going to happen." He sounded tired. "Correct, after the last two reactors shut down, the ship will have only backup power from the capacitors. There is enough charge in the jump drive coils for one more moderate jump, unfortunately such a jump will not get us to the next closest other star system, and we clearly can't go back where we were. I expect the Thuranin will detect our current position within two hours, the gamma ray burst when we jumped in could not be masked, and as we are on the periphery of their star system, this area is highly likely to be within their sensor coverage. The Thuranin now know one of their own star carriers is hostile, they will be calling in reinforcements. Colonel, you may now speak."

  "The situation can't be entirely hopeless, or you wouldn't bother shutting down the reactors. What are our options?" By options, I meant other than engaging the self-destruct.

  "We have one option, two if you include self-destructing the ship. We use the remaining charge in the jump drive to leave this position as soon as possible, I am running a diagnostic on the jump drive coils now, to avoid rupturing the drive during a jump. Our jumps while we were within the dampening field, and then within my warpage of spacetime, caused severe damage to the drive coils, only twenty seven percent of the drive coils can be trusted to function properly at this point."

  "Jumping to the middle of interstellar space, with all the reactors dead and the capacitors draining, sounds like going from the fire into the frying pan, we're dead either way. Can the reactors be fixed?"

  "The short answer is no. Not with the equipment onboard. Star carriers travel with a host of support vessels, and are not designed to sustain themselves for long-term operations. Spare parts, and the ability to manufacture replacement parts, are in short supply. The long answer is, shmaybe."

  "Shmaybe?" I asked
, surprised. This was the old Skippy I knew.

  "Something short of a confident maybe. Given enough time, and raw materials, the ship might be restored to functioning. I have a plan. You are not going to like it."

  Skippy was right. I didn't like it. I also didn't have a choice. Or a better idea.

  Not having anything useful to do on the bridge, in a ship with no power, I helped clean up the mess, talked to the crew briefly on the intercom, and headed off to the sick bay. Not surprisingly, none of the special forces were there, although the injury report Skippy loaded onto my iPad listed several broken bones, concussions and soft tissue injuries like dislocated shoulders among our SpecOps super soldiers. They were taking care of each other, and remaining alert, as if they needed to be ready to repel boarders or some crazy stuff like that, they would report to the sickbay when I gave them an all clear signal. Maybe they simply needed to feel useful, I could understand that, I felt pretty useless myself at that moment. Chang had the conn, such that it was, and the duty crew in the CIC was monitoring our malfunctioning sensor field in case the Thuranin had an extra ship out there somewhere. Right now, even a Kristang dropship could have shot holes in us.

  There were three of the science team in sickbay; one wrist sprain, one broken nose and bloody forehead combination, plus one broken leg. Doctor Skippy the mad scientist was taking care of them with his scary-looking robots, the science team heard my brief status report over the intercom and naturally had many questions, I had few answers. What I should have done is walk around the ship reassuring people. Instead, I took a brief break to splash water on my face and flush the puke taste out of my mouth.

  In the cramped Thuranin bathroom, kneeling on the floor to reach the sink, I addressed Skippy, trying to talk to him the way I normally did, keep the fear out of my voice. "All right, Skippy, I have to give you props, even your stupid plans work great."