"Sir, we may be missing something," Smythe said, while we were sitting in the galley, bouncing around ideas for attacking the surveyor and its escort ships. "I read the after action report from your first mission. The Kristang ships that were attached to the Dutchman, you decided to jump them into a gas giant planet," he looked around the compartment and people nodded, "because you were concerned they would eject drones that contain those ships' flight logs. A drone's logs would have told the Kristang, or Thuranin, that a Kristang frigate and a Thuranin star carrier had been taken over by a hostile force."
"Hey!" Skippy protested. "I wasn't hostile. Perhaps I wasn't as polite as-"
"Skippy, that's not what he meant," I suppressed a laugh.
"Oh. Understood. Hostile in this case means taking over their ships and killing all of them. I guess that could be considered hostile," Skippy grumbled. "In certain cultures."
Smythe nodded. "Right. Well, then, when we attack these ships, assuming by that time we have some plan to destroy them, during the attack, those ships will eject stealth drones. Those drones may tell the Thuranin that their ships were attacked by one ship, and they might even be able to determine that one ship is a former Thuranin ship."
"It's possible," Skippy admitted. "During a fight, if our stealth field is damaged, our disguise as a Jeraptha ship won't hold.”
"That's the problem, sir," Smythe concluded, "we have to both destroy those ships, and do it in a way that the Thuranin think it was an ordinary Jeraptha raid. Those drones will blow our cover story."
"Yeah, Joe," Skippy, said, excited. "That's a good point. That is a very good point. You got an answer for that, smart guy?"
"Sure, Skippy, you're going to take care of that problem for us."
"Oh, I am? And how am I going to do that? Maybe you weren't paying attention, so I'll summarize the problem for you," he said, almost gleefully. "Starships carry drones which contain the ship's flight recorder data. When a ship is destroyed, or seriously damaged, one or many of those drones are ejected. They are tiny, and they are stealthed. Our sensor field will not be able to detect all the drones, and that, Joey my boy, is the problem; the Thuranin will eventually send a ship to find out what happened to their precious surveyor and its escorts. I am hoping, of course, to fool their sensors into thinking our ship is a Jeraptha cruiser, but that is not guaranteed to work."
"Not a problem, Skippy. You can handle that easily."
"Hmm. Since I left my magic unicorn back on Paradise or somewhere, how am I supposed to find an unknown number of stealthed drones, smart guy?"
"Simple, Skippy. By asking them to tell us where they are."
There was a pause before Skippy spoke again, maybe while he tried to figure out what my idea was. "Perhaps I need to explain the concept of 'stealth' to you again, Joe."
"No, I understa-"
Adams took in a sharp breath. "Sir, I might know what you're thinking."
"Oh, this is going to be good," Skippy laughed. "Go ahead, Sergeant Adams, enlighten me, please."
She looked at me, and I nodded, so she leaned forward to speak. "Skippster-"
"Skippster?" He asked, surprised.
"Skippy, then," Adams said with a wink. "These drones are stealthed, to prevent an enemy locating them, but they will respond to a signal, the correct coded signal, from a Thuranin ship, correct?"
"Yeah, duh, they wouldn't be much good otherwise. Again, the problem is, oh, shit."
I laughed. "You get it now, Skippy?"
He gave another heartfelt sigh. "When I load a virus into the Thuranin computer, to make the ship drop off a drone before it jumps, with that drone containing their rendezvous coordinates, I am also supposed to download the drone retrieval codes, right?"
"Uh huh," I said, "you got it. Then we'll jump to wherever those ships went on their way to the rendezvous, you send a signal for those drones to ping us their location."
"You can do that, Skippy?" Adams asked.
"That, yes, I can do that. Damn it, you monkeys think you're so smart. Sergeant Adams, I thought I hated Colonel Joe the worst, but you're moving up the list."
"I'm honored," Adams said mockingly.
"After I tell the drones to ping us their location, we use them for target practice?" Skippy asked.
"No, no, I don't want to destroy them," I said quickly.
"Huh. All right, apparently I'm still missing something here," Skippy's voice had a convincing undertone of puzzlement.
"We're not going to destroy them," I explained, "those drone aren’t going to blow our cover story. They’re going to sell our cover story for us. After you locate and access them, you are going to alter their flight logs, so all the drones contain data showing their ships were attacked by a Jeraptha task force, whatever number and types of ships the Jeraptha would most likely assign to such a mission-"
"Two light cruisers," Skippy stated.
"Then you'll tell those drones to go silent again, until a real Thuranin ship comes looking for them. If that ever happens. Whatever ship finds the drones will provide convincing data about that surveyor ship being destroyed by the Jeraptha, and they will have no reason to suspect humans were involved. Those drones will sell the story for us."
"Damn," Skippy grumbled unhappily. "That actually is a fairly good plan. From a monkey, amazing. That plan is ingeniously devious, and I'm saying that as a compliment. Joe, I'm telling you, once you're done playing soldier, you have a bright career ahead of you as a criminal mastermind. Or, you, know, politics."
"Skippy," I laughed, "I would never do anything as sleazy as politics."
"How about crime?"
"Crime we can talk about later, I have plenty of playing soldier to do first." That did get me thinking. When I signed up for the UN ExFor, my commitment was open-ended, since we were at war. Now that Earth was, as far as UNEF Command knew at the moment, at peace, I had no idea how many more years I had until I could either leave the US Army, or re-up. My promotion to colonel was temporary, and, everyone knew, BS. My promotion to sergeant must have come with a commitment to some number of years, which I hadn't thought to ask about at Camp Alpha. It hadn't seemed important at the time, none of us expected to live long enough to care. Fighting aliens with our old trusty M-4 rifles hadn't made us feel particularly hopeful about our life expectancy.
"I have to admit," Skippy said, "this barrel of monkeys has come up with some decent ideas."
"Thank you, Skippy," I said guardedly. Knowing Skippy, he was going to add a snarky and insulting comment. He didn't disappoint me.
"The reason I said 'decent' rather than 'good', is because these ideas are fine in theory, with the tiny, tiny problem that we do not actually have a practical way for me to, as you so ignorantly assumed, hack into a Thuranin ship."
"What?" I asked in shock. "You took over this ship like," I snapped my fingers, "that. In the blink of an eye! How did you do that?"
"Uh huh, yup, excellent observation skills you have there, Joe. I took over the Dutchman with my incredible awesomeness. However, since you apparently weren't paying attention at the time, the Thuranin brought the Flower into a docking pad, before I was able to seize control of their crude computer and put those idiot cyborgs into sleep mode. To do that, I had to be close, Joe, by close I mean within about ten thousand kilometers. We got that close because the Flying Dutchman is a star carrier, that expected to be taking a Kristang frigate aboard. None of the Thuranin ships in the surveyor task force will let an unknown ship come that close to them."
"Well, hell, Skippy, you could have told us that earlier, before we wasted all this time dreaming up impossible plans."
"But you were having so much fun, Joe, I didn't want to spoil it for you."
"We're not here for fun, Skippy," I said between gritted teeth. "We may be stupid monkeys to you, but the monkey brains on this ship, and you are all we've got to come up with a plan to stop that surveyor ship from destroying our home. You think this is funny-"
"Pathetic wo
uld be more accurate," he mumbled.
"-but we do not. You're telling me it is impossible for you to hack into these ships?"
"Again with you not paying attention, Joe. You seem distracted. Are you hungry, or is this just you being perpetually horny so you can't think straight? I didn't say it was not possible, I said it was not easy. There is a huge difference between those."
"You really-" Fortunately, Skippy interrupted me before I said something harsh.
"Let me explain it to you," he said. "We know those two support ships will be tanking up from the second planet in that system, a gas giant. We jump in behind the fourth planet, another gas giant, we jump in on the far side so the planet will mask the gamma rays from our entry. Then someone takes me on a stealth flyby close to one of those support ships, and I can hack in."
"Oh, like flying by that relay station. That's a great idea, Skippy. We do the flyby in a dropship again?"
"Nope, it's not going to be that easy, Joe. To hack in while I'm flying by, I will need to be within about four thousand kilometers at the closest approach. A dropship, even stealthed, would be detected at that range. And the Thuranin wouldn't let a comet get within four thousand kilometers of them, they'd either move it away or blast it to pieces."
"No dropship? Then how are we supposed to fly from one planet to another?"
"Well, heh, heh, you're not going to like this idea."
CHAPTER THIRTY
He was right, I hated the idea. It was a terrible, awful, stupid idea from Skippy. It was also the only idea we had, damn it. We jumped in on the far side of a gas giant, a planet that was a quarter of the way across the star system from the planet where the Thuranin support ships were taking on fuel. With the Dutchman in stealth mode, we let our orbit take us around the planet, and Skippy picked up transmissions between the two support ships. The good news is those ships were alone, we had been afraid they'd have a frigate or destroyer with them. The bad news is we arrived almost too late, one ship had already half-filled its fuel tanks, and the other was not far behind its sister ship. We had to move quickly.
Desai piloted the dropship, with Lieutenant Xi of the Chinese Air Force as her copilot. I took Skippy with me, plus Giraud as my backup. In what I thought was an interesting maneuver, Desai burned the dropship's engines hard while we were on the far side of the gas giant, then cut power back as we slingshotted around the planet and escaped from its gravity well. After another three hours of relatively gentle thrust, we were moving faster than a speeding bullet, on course to intercept the tanker ship as it hung in low orbit around the second planet.
To remain undetected, we could not burn the engines for deceleration until both tankers were on the other side of the gas giant, which was complicated because while we were racing through interplanetary space, the first tanker finished taking on fuel had moved away. We were cutting this close, very close. There was only a twelve minute window fire the engines, before the orbits of one or the other support ships brought them around into view. Desai decelerated us to the proper speed in a high-G burn maneuver that busted a blood vessel in my left eye and gave me a nosebleed, while those ships were hidden by the planet, then she cut off the engines, and I attached my helmet, stepped outside and gently pushed off to drift away.
Skippy's idea, that I didn't like at all, was for someone to get into a Kristang spacesuit, with Skippy, and a jetpack. Skippy was irritated that we called the thing a 'jetpack' instead of an Individual Maneuvering Unit, his argument was that the thing technically did not have jets. We ignored him. It was a jetpack. Jetpacks were cool, 'IMU' was not cool. A stealthed suit, even with a jetpack, was small enough to fly past a lowly tanker ship, as close as four thousand kilometers, without being detected. In addition to the jetpack, my suit had a waist belt with an attachment point for Skippy, and a portable stealth field generator.
The idea was for someone in a suit to take Skippy on a flyby, using the jetpack to make small course corrections as needed. The suit wearer and Skippy would then swing around the other side of the planet, fire the jetpack to climb into a slightly higher orbit, where the dropship would be to retrieve them eventually. That was the plan, anyway.
This idiotic plan was why I was hanging seemingly motionless in space, with the target gas giant planet a basketball-sized orange blob in front of me. With gentle puffs of thrusters, Desai moved the dropship safely away from me, then she fired the engines to make the dropship swing much wider around the planet.
"Captain Desai, can you hear me?" I asked.
"Loud and clear, Colonel," she replied.
"Skippy, we're communicating through the wormhole?" We were still close enough to the dropship that it might be able to pick up my faint transmission directly.
"Yes, affirmative. Wormhole is active and operating nominally," Skippy reported. To allow us to talk to the dropship, without the Thuranin detecting our transmissions, Skippy had done his microwormhole trick again. One end of the wormhole was near the dropship and moved with that spacecraft, the other end stayed a hundred fifty meters behind Skippy. According to that super smart beer can, it was extremely unlikely the Thuranin ships could detect either our very low-power transmissions, or the faint radiation from the microwormhole. That was good, because small as one person in a suit was, I was way too large to fit through that super tiny wormhole.
"Great. To be safe, Desai, we don't transmit if either of those Thuranin ships are line of sight to us."
"Understood, Colonel," she agreed. "Cutting thrust in 3, 2, 1 now. The first Thuranin ship should be coming around the planet in two minutes, forty seconds."
The sensors built into my suit were not sensitive enough to detect the ships yet, I had to take Desai's word for it. For the next four and a half hours, I zoomed through empty space, the planet ahead of me growing larger in my vision. Really, I was racing through space, only there was no sensation of movement. No reference point except the giant planet. Skippy and I chatted only occasionally, there wasn't much to talk about, other than him instructing me to make tiny course corrections with the jetpack. After four hours, he told me to activate the stealth field. The stealth unit required a lot of power, and the generator we brought along could only supply power for a couple hours. If all went well, a couple hours of stealth is all we would need.
If all went well.
"There's the first ship," Skippy announced. "Right on time, it hasn't altered its orbit at all. Picking up ship to ship transmissions, there are still only those two support ships in system." We had been concerned there might be a warship escorting the tankers, there didn't appear to be. This deep inside Thuranin territory, they didn't see a need to escort such low-value ships.
A symbol for the first ship popped up on the inside of my helmet faceplate, it was hugging the crescent of the planet, climbing away slowly. We waited, and a symbol for the second ship popped up, it was still too far away for me to see with the naked eye.
"Uh, oh," Skippy said, "we've got a problem. A big, big problem."
"What is it? They detected us?"
"No, those crappy ships couldn't see us yet even if we were lighting off fireworks out here. That second ship has been slower to take on fuel because of a fault with its drogue, the unit at the bottom of the fuel line it has lowered into the atmosphere. The fault has gotten worse, the Thuranin have decided to retract the fuel line now, even though the ship's tanks are only 82% full."
"Yeah, so?" I couldn't see how a flying gas station was a problem for us.
"So, as soon as the drogue is clear of the atmosphere, that ship will be changing course to join the other ship, climbing out of orbit to jump distance. From its transmissions, I can predict the ship's course, and it is a very big problem. The jetpack does not have enough fuel to alter our course sufficiently that we can intercept that ship, not within four thousand kilometers. We'll be too far away for me to hack into their systems." He sounded genuinely sad. "I'm sorry, Joe, we're going to miss this chance."
Crap. "This is our
only chance. You sure where that ship is going?"
"Yes, I am sure. The degree of uncertainty is not great enough to make us intercepting that ship be a realistic possibility. It is simple orbital mechanics, Joe, the jetpack does not contain enough fuel."
"Force equals mass times acceleration?" I asked.
"Um, yeah. I'm surprised you know-"
"Our problem right now isn't the acceleration part, it's the mass, right?"
"Correct. Between me, you, the stealth field generator, and the suit, the jetpack can't manage to provide the delta vee, the change in velocity, for us to alter course sufficiently to come close to that ship."
"The problem isn't you, either, it's me and this suit."
"Mostly the suit, it has more than twice your mass, Joe."
"Yeah, I can't take the suit off, so." I reached down to unbuckle the fasteners that held my suit attached to the jetpack.
"Joe, what are you doing? We need that jetpack, you dumb monkey."
The jetpack came loose, I swung it around in front of me, and held it steady with my legs. Although in zero gravity is weighed nothing, its substantial mass made it awkward to move around. "No, Skippy, you need the jetpack." The stupid tool belt fastener was on the side, not the front, and to undo it, I had to turn a knob to expose the button. It was intended as a safety feature, I'm sure. Right then, it was a pain in the ass. The tool belt finally came undone, and I pulled it tightly around the jetpack, trying to keep the mass of Skippy and the stealth field generator centered. "There, done." I let go of the jetpack with my legs, and it hung right in front of me. "Tell me how to program a course into this thing," I asked. The jetpack had a limited ability to be controlled remotely from a module strapped to my left wrist.
"A course? Where?" Skippy sounded panicked. "Back to the dropship?"
"No, Skippy," I explained patiently, "a course to take you within four thousand kilometers of that tanker ship. You said it, we're going to miss this chance if the jetpack has to move my mass. This is our only chance, Skippy, our only chance to follow that ship to the surveyor and destroy it. Our only chance to stop the Thuranin from reaching my home planet and killing everyone. You are not going to miss that chance. You're going to flyby that ship, you're going to hack into it, and you're going to rendezvous with the dropship. Then you are going to do everything you can to stop that surveyor ship."
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 44
