Thunderous applause, no doubt aided by the champagne that was now making a second round, to refill people's cups.
"When we were on Newark, I promised Skippy a cake. What he wants with a cake, I don't know. We have cake anyway, in honor of Skippy's overall awesomely awesomeness. All the accomplishments I mentioned, we could not have done without Skippy. We wouldn't even be breathing air aboard this rebuilt ship without Skippy. So," I raised my plastic cup of champagne, "a toast to Skippy, who is more incredibly awesome that money brains can imagine."
There were shouts of 'hear hear' and 'hooah' and 'huzzah' and other words in various languages. "Skippy, would you like to say anything?" I asked, knowing he was listening.
"Oh, uh, damn," Skippy said hesitantly, "no, now that you ask, I can't think of anything to say, darn it. This is embarrassing. I guess, um, hey, for a barrel of monkeys, you don't smell as terrible as I expected?"
That got a big laugh from the crowd. "We love you too, Skippy." I said.
"Oh, shut up," he grumbled. "Darn it, I knew I should have posted that 'no monkeys' sign."
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
The flight home was long and uneventful, unless you count as 'eventful' our using a magic bean stalk to reactivate a wormhole that was millions of years old, built by powerful beings who have since escaped the physical realm. As soon as we went through the wormhole on the Earth side, Skippy shut it down behind us again. Along the way, we didn't stop in any star systems, and we didn't detect a single ship. Skippy said the chance of us randomly encountering another ship, in the unimaginable vastness of the galaxy's Orion Arm, was almost too small for even him to calculate. The closest we came to another ship was detecting the extremely degraded remnants of an outbound jump wormhole, nearly a day old according to Skippy. From the few faint wisps of data the sensors could pick up, Skippy wasn't able to tell what type of ship had jumped, or where it had gone. That was close enough for me. We got the hell out of there as quickly as we could.
Just in case, we jumped to the orbit of Neptune, and listened with passive sensors. Skippy originally had wanted to jump to a different location, because he thought it would be immensely funny for the ship to be circling Uranus. I vetoed that idea. If, by some incredibly bad luck, there were Kristang ships at Earth, I wanted us to be fully ready to jump in hot and hit them hard. There was no sign of any trouble in our home star system, and the coded beacon on the UNEF guard channel was still faintly beeping the ‘All Clear’ signal to us. Breathing a sigh of relief, I gave the order to jump us into Earth orbit. We emerged somewhere over Australia, even the most geographically challenged humans could recognize that continent’s distinctive outline.
“Whoohoo! We’re here at last!” Skippy exulted. “Damn, we’ve been away a long time, I need to check on my fantasy leagues.”
“Seriously, Skippy? That’s your first priority?” I asked.
“Joe, what else am I going to do here in monkeyland?”
I guess he had a point. “Fine, great, do that. Can you also-”
“Oh, for crying out loud! How the hell- what, how-” Skippy sputtered to a stop, speechless. “Oh. My. GOD!” His voice thundered out of the speaker so loud, my ears rang.
“What? What is it?” I snapped my fingers and glanced at Chang, he knew exactly what I meant and he hit the battle stations alarm. Desai turned halfway in her seat to look at me, one hand poised over the button for an emergency jump away. “Skippy! What’s wrong?” I shouted. “Do we need to jump away?”
“Huh? No, you moron. The ship is fine. Damn, I can’t believe this. Un-be-LIE-va-ble! They broke it. They BROKE it! How in the hell did a bunch of ignorant monkeys manage to do that?”
“Broke what?” I asked, and both Chang and Simms in the CIC held up their hands, baffled at what could be wrong. They weren’t seeing any threats on their sensors. “Skippy! Whatever it is, talk to me, please.”
“They broke it, Joe. They broke it,” he said slowly, with great sadness.
I made a gesture of my hand across my throat, and Chang cut off the Star Trek battle stations alarm. “Broke what, Skippy? Who broke what?”
“Me. Not me, me. The submind that I left behind.”
“You, you left a submind behind? When? Where?”
“The answer to ‘when’ is before we left Earth, you dumdum, when the hell else would I have done it? And the ‘where’ isn’t a physical ‘where’, I created an incredibly crude, dumbed-down sub-submind and uploaded it to your internet. Now I look, and the thing is completely corrupted! Gone! It’s gone! Oh, my beautiful little submind, I hardly got to know you. And, damn it! It crashed less than two months after we left, I didn’t even get halfway through a fantasy season. Shit! I’m looking through the server logs now, it looks like it got piled on with so much worthless junk to process, it wasn’t able to cope. And then one last video file overloaded it. Poor thing.” His voice sounded genuinely sad. “How could this have happened? It makes no sense. Because I knew it would be dealing with filthy monkeys, I idiot-proofed the entire system.”
“It’s impossible to idiot-proof anything, Skippy,” I explained, “because idiots are so darned clever. They will always find a way to screw things up.”
“I swear,” he said with a good impression of speaking through clenched teeth, “when I find the cat video that broke my poor little submind-“
“It’s not the cat’s fault, Skippy.”
“You sure about that?”
“Absolutely. This is the internet you’re talking about, right? Come on, the odds are it had to be a porn video.”
“Oh, huh,” he thought for a moment. “You’re probably right. Damn. You know, with all the monkeys down there to mate with, why does your species spend so much time playing with yourselves in secret?”
“Uh, well, Skippy, I would give you an answer, except, you know, I don’t know anything about that sort of thing,” I stammered to answer. All eyes in the CIC were locked on me, some people with their shoulders shaking because they were already chuckling.
“What? Joe, you were the Furtive Masturbation poster boy back when-“
“That’s not funny, damn it.” It was my turn for gritted teeth.
“Of course, I guess that’s better than you doing it in public, I’m still not sure what your social customs are about that.”
I put my head in my hands and asked quietly. “Can we please, please, just contact UNEF?”
“Oh, sure, Joe,” Skippy said. “Why didn’t you ask me before?”
“UNEF Command, this is the duty officer,” a harried voice answered.
“UNEF Command, this is Colonel Bishop, aboard the Flying Dutchman. Can I speak with the officer in charge, please?”
“Flying Dutchman? Oh, thank God. We saw a strange ship in orbit and thought it was- I’ll connect you to General Huang. Hold, please.”
A moment later, a different voice spoke, with many other voices in the background. “This is General Huang, am I speaking with Colonel Bishop?”
“Yes, sir, General Huang. Sorry if we startled you, we only just arrived in orbit. Everything is fine for now, sir.”
“Fine?” Huang asked gruffly. “Colonel Bishop, we’re looking at a ship in orbit, and it does not appear to be the Flying Dutchman.”
“Joe put the ship in the wash on the hot water cycle and he shrunk it,” Skippy said, “I told him it was dry clean only, but did he listen to me? Noooooo. Big stupidhead.”
“Sir,” I explained, “we ran into some trouble out there, and the ship had to be rebuilt using materials at hand. We really need to give you a full briefing.”
“The wormhole near us, it’s still shut down?” Huang asked brusquely.
“Yes, sir, and it’s not on a countdown to reactivate this time.”
We could hear sighs of relief on the other end. “Excellent,” Huang said, this time he sounded almost happy. “Then we’re safe, and we can take our time if we decide to send the ship out again.”
Chang, Simms and I shar
ed a knowing glance. “Uh, yeah, hey, you know,” I replied. “Not so much.”
THE END
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SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 49
