“True, true.” Skippy admitted. “Is this better?” He reverted to featureless chrome.
Chang fairly growled. “Who the fuck is Skippy?”
“You got some ‘splainin’ to do.” Adams said without a trace of humor.
I noticed neither of them added ‘sir’.
I took a deep breath. “This is Skippy, his code name is Hacker,” I pointed to his shiny self. “What looks like a beer can here is an artificial intelligence-“
“A very small manifestation of me in local spacetime-“ Skippy interrupted.
“Skippy, will you shut up a minute? An AI that was built by the beings we know as the Elders or the First Ones, whatever they’re called. The super civilization who inhabited the galaxy before the Rindhalu, the beings who built the wormholes. They left their physical existence a long time ago, and they left behind the Sentinels. And they left this AI, who is millions of years old. An immensely powerful AI, he released the controls on this Dodo, he disabled the Ruhars’ weapons, he is right now masking us from the hamsters’ sensors and transmitting the proper IFF codes to the Kristang. He is how we are going to board and capture a Kristang ship, do the same thing to a Thuranin star carrier, and then we’re going to disable the wormhole near Earth, so neither the Ruhar nor the Kristang can have access to our home any more.”
“Holy fucking shit.” Simms breathed in disbelief.
“Yeah, that was my reaction when I was locked up in a warehouse by the Ruhar, and a beer can on a dusty shelf started talking to me.”
Adams wasn’t convinced. “Sir, I’m trying to wrap my head around this. We’re trusting our future, and the fate of humanity, to a talking beer can?”
“When you put it that way-“
“A super smart, nay, impossibly, inconceivably smart, talking beer can!” Skippy protested.
“Adams, forget what Skippy looks like to us. You saw what happened back at the warehouse, the Ruhar couldn’t use their weapons, but we could. That wasn’t me, it wasn’t UNEF, it was Skippy here. Skippy hacked into this Dodo so we could fly it, that sure wasn’t me and it wasn’t UNEF. We just boosted out of orbit, right through the middle of a Ruhar fleet, and they didn’t see us. Skippy has hacked into the Ruhar sensor systems and instructed them to ignore us. No way could UNEF do any of this. Skippy is the ultimate weapon, our ace in the hole, and humanity for sure by God needs an ace right now. With Skippy, we can disable, shut down, turn off, the only wormhole that allows the lizards access to Earth.”
Adams wasn't convinced. “How do we know this isn’t a trick by the lizards, that this AI isn’t working for them?”
“Adams, if you can think of anything, anything at all, that the lizards would gain from helping us escape from the Ruhar and steal one of their Dodos, please tell me. Because I can’t think of anything. Skippy is going to build our trust the same way we’re going to build his; by doing, one action at a time. He got me, you, Chang and Desai out of prison, and now we’re off the surface of Paradise. If we were by ourselves, we’d still be trying to figure how to open the door on this thing.” I pointed to the Dodo’s deck. “I did consider maybe this is a Ruhar trick, to get us aboard a Kristang ship, maybe the hamsters planted a bomb on this thing, this particular Dodo. Again, I can’t think of why the Ruhar would go through all the trouble. This war has been going on for a very long time without humans involved. They don’t need us; the lizards, the hamsters, the Thuranin, none of them need us primitive humans for anything. Maybe this is all an elaborate ruse for some reason we can’t see. Ok, maybe it is. Or maybe Skippy is telling the truth, and we have a chance to shut down the wormhole that gives the lizards access to Earth. If there is any chance that is true, any chance at all, we need to take it. We’ll know whether we can trust Skippy when we have control of a Kristang warship. It’s as simple as that.” Skippy had remained uncharacteristically silent the whole time I’d been speaking. Part of being super smart is knowing when to keep your mouth shut and let the other guy talk.
Chang, who had remained silent, but had been exchanging increasingly tense looks with his three Chinese soldiers, cleared his throat. “Colonel,” he said with emphasis, “we volunteered for this mission, without knowing the details. I expected the plan was to attack the Kristang. Now you are telling us that our mission is to save the world? To rescue Earth from the Kristang?”
“Uh,” it sounded so dramatic when he said it that way, “yes. Yes, we’re going to shut down the wormhole that allows the Kristang access to earth. The situation will go back to the way it was before the wormhole shift,” I assumed everyone had heard the rumors about that by now, “Earth will be all by itself in the middle of nowhere, and this war will go on without humans.”
“Save the world?” Simms repeated incredulously.
“That’s the idea.” I nodded. "I know it's kind of a cliché, but-"
"No, save the world works for me." Simms said thoughtfully. "Shit. Is this real?"
Chang clicked his zPhone off and spoke briefly to his three soldiers in Mandarin, then turned back to me. “Colonel, I find all this difficult to believe. However, not long ago, I was stationed at an army outpost on the Mongolian border. Now, I am in an alien space ship, a thousand lightyears from home. What is possible has been redefined so many times, that I’m prepared to accept almost anything. So, if this mission has even a small chance to free our planet from the Kristang, we will do our utmost.”
Damn, his English was better than my own. “Thank you, Colonel Chang.” I scanned the other faces.
Giraud gave a Gallic shrug. “We’re going to kill Kristang, no? I am in, as you say.”
Simms and Adams exchanged a glance. “Oh, what the hell, sure, us too.” Simms declared. “Colonel, this is it, right, the whole truth, everything? No more surprises? We’re allied with a talking beer can, to shut down the wormhole? Now that we’re out here, I expect the need for Opsec is out the window.” She looked meaningfully at the airlock door. “If that expression can be used in space.”
I nodded. “You know everything that I know. I can’t promise there won’t be more surprises, but they’ll be surprises to me too.”
“Why us, sir?” Sergeant Thomson asked in his oh-so-proper British accent. “Why not bring this, Skippy, to UNEF HQ, and let them sort it out? Send up a proper special ops force, SAS, all that?”
Chang and Simms both made a disparaging snort at the same time. “Sergeant,” Chang said, “UNEF would first take a week, at least, to figure what to do. Then, because they are risk averse, they’d likely turn our AI friend over to the Ruhar, or the Kristang, whoever is in charge of the planet at the time, in hopes of gaining favor. It wouldn’t matter anyway, once this became known at UNEF HQ, there is no way it could be kept secret long. The hamsters and lizards would know about it quickly.”
“Also,” I added, “we have to go now, to take advantage of the situation. The Ruhar are busy consolidating their hold over the planet, ships are jumping in and out overhead, and there’s still a remnant Kristang force hanging around. If we wait, the Kristang will pull back, and then we’d need to raid the Ruhar to capture a ship. The Ruhar have too many ships here supporting each other for us to sneak away with one.”
“Right.” Thomson seemed satisfied. “One more question, if I may; why is the AI called Skippy?” From the nodding heads around the Dodo, that seemed to be a universal question.
“Because,” I held Skippy in front of my face and scowled at him, “as I said, he is super smart, super powerful, and a super asshole. He wanted to be referred to as the Lord God Almighty, so I named him Skippy, to remind me what a shithead he is.”
“Guilty as charged.” Skippy said cheerily.
“He doesn’t mind being called, uh, Skippy?” Adams asked pointedly.
“I don’t mind being called Skippy, you don’t need to ask Colonel Joe, I am a person.” Skippy said. “No, I don’t care what you pack of flea-bitten monkeys call me.”
“Monkeys?” Putri asked. US Army Specialist
Randy Putri, not Private Asok Putri of the Indian army. I know, it’s confusing for me, too. I was going to break tradition and call them by their first names in the future.
“He thinks he’s being nice by considering us monkeys,” I explained, “to him, we’re all bacteria.”
“Ha!” Skippy scoffed. “You aspire to be as smart as bacteria.”
“Right, then.” Thomson said flatly. “This bugger is a proper arsehole.”
Adams stuck her tongue out at Skippy, which is a gesture I never expected from her. “What’s next, sir?”
I inwardly sighed with relief. “Skippy, can you load schematics of likely Kristang ships on everyone’s zPhones, and also show it on the display here?”
“Done.” He responded simply, and the display on the bulkhead behind me came to life. “This is a typical Kristang frigate, the type of small ship that most likely will be sent in to pick us up-“
A real colonel was responsible for commanding a brigade-size force, that meant planning offensive and defensive operations of several thousand soldiers, including all the training, logistics, communications and coordination with air power, artillery and other units in the area. Making and executing big plans, involving thousands of people and enormous firepower. A real colonel had training, formal and practical education, and years of experience before assuming command. I had none of that.
What I did have was hard-earned experience in small unit combat, experience in the bush, and more importantly, villages and towns of northern Nigeria. Taking a Kristang ship was small unit combat, and I figured clearing a ship compartment by compartment was similar to fighting house to house and room to room. The US military used to call that type of warfare Military Operations in Urban Terrain, and military bases across the USA contain fake villages for training troops how to fight in such confined spaces. During the Cold War, these fake villages were set up to resemble eastern Europe, with signs on streets and buildings in a vaguely Slavic or Germanic language. Recently the focus has been on the Middle East, and we soldiers gave the training towns politically incorrect names like Hadjistan. Whatever the name, or the grand scenario the towns were built for, they trained soldiers how to clear an area building by building and room by room; the type of fighting where you often couldn't see who you were shooting at, and calling in Apache gunships meant pulling back quickly so the Hellfire missiles didn't hit your own troops.
To plan our attack, and provide hasty training to our crew, I assigned Lt Giraud. Chang, Simms and Desai were senior to Giraud in rank, but Chang's experience was in artillery, not infantry. Simms was a logistics officer, and Desai a pilot. You might figure that Sergeant Adams, as a Marine, was the logical person to plan an operation for boarding an enemy ship. Which would have been a good thought, back in the War of 1812. The US Marine Corps was a little rusty on the whole 'away boarders' thing. That left me and Giraud as infantry officers, and Giraud was French special forces. What he knew about small unit tactics, and what I didn't, kind of scared me, special forces guys were hard-core. I kept having to remind him that our assault force was not the elite special forces killers he was used to working with, and that we'd be operating in zero gravity, with no training and with people we mostly didn't know. We decided that we would largely have to wing it in our attack, because there were too many unknowns. What I wanted was for me to lead a force to capture the ship's control center, which was aft of the bridge on most Kristang ships, while Giraud's group captured the engineering section, before the Kristang there could damage the drive units or reactor, or even self-destruct the ship. That plan was universally shot down by everyone involved, including Skippy.
"Colonel," Adams declared, arms folded across her chest in a gesture that was not easy in zero gravity, "You can't go racing around the enemy ship. You're the commander. You need to remain behind, and command."
"She's right, Colonel Joe," Skippy admonished me. "I can tell you where your people and the Kristang are, and what they're doing, and I can control parts of the ship, but I need someone to tell me what you want me to do. And where your people should go. My genius doesn't include coordinating a troop of monkeys in combat. You know what your people can do, and more importantly, what they can't do."
After protesting that my experience was at the fireteam and squad level, and that Giraud would be a better candidate to remain with Skippy and coordinate the attack, I was forced to concede they were right. In the end, the unspoken factor that decided the issue was that I was comfortable with Skippy, he was comfortable with me, and no one else wanted the task of dealing with the twitchy alien AI.
Giraud made our crew mentally run through a simulated attack on a typical Kristang frigate, using Skippy's best guess of where the Kristang aboard would be, and what systems aboard the frigate he could control. It surprised me when Skippy said he couldn't seize total control of the frigate's computer systems, at least not right away. The Kristang very deliberately and carefully had built their ships to prevent the possibility of an enemy remotely hacking into their computers, on account that they were afraid of their patrons the cyborg Thuranin doing exactly that. Because the Thuranin had done that before, and the Kristang weren't going to fall victim to that trick a second time, or, as Skippy reported, more like the hundredth time. The Kristang had gotten better at hardening their computer systems from intrusion, but their technology was still far enough below the level of the Thuranin that the Kristang weren't yet capable of even imagining some of the technology the Thuranin routinely used. Fortunately for us, Skippy's technology was as far beyond the Thuranin as the Thuranin were beyond humans. Or, as Skippy of course said it so tactfully, a treeful of monkeys.
The key to the whole plan was that we needed to literally plug Skippy into the ship, to establish a physical connection to the ship's network for him. Once he was in, he'd have access to the whole ship, and could download a subroutine of himself into control nodes all over the ship. But we first needed to locate what was basically a wall jack aboard the frigate, and plug a zPhone into it. Fortunately, the proper cables and connectors were aboard the Dodo. Unfortunately, getting to the wall jack closest to the frigate's two landing bays was going to be a bitch. And Skippy's trick of disabling weapons, like he did with Ruhar rifles, wouldn't work with the Kristang, because the Kristang didn't trust that type of technology, and their rifles mostly did without fancy computer chips.
Giraud's plan was to throw the entire boarding force of twenty two people into the effort to establish a physical connection, after which our crew would split into two groups, one led by Giraud and one led by Chang. With Giraud, I assigned Sergeant Thompson, while Sergeant Adams was going to Chang and the Chinese sergeant. I could see people were totally keyed up, completely understanding that jacking a zPhone into a data port was life and death not only for us, but potentially for all of humanity. Rousing speeches were not needed. I ordered everyone to eat and drink something, and relax. Giraud agreed, adding that he wanted the crew to memorize the layout of typical Kristang frigates and destroyers, which helpfully each came in only two major types. Picture the layouts in your mind, he advised, over and over, and over and over again, and then repeat, until it became instinct, ingrained in your spatial memory.
"I think we have as good a plan as we'll get." I told Giraud as we both ate a Hooah! energy bar. The waiting, with the Dodo coasting away from Paradise, hoping to get picked up by an enemy warship, was wearing on everyone's nerves.
Giraud gave an exaggerated shrug. "Plans are a start, no more."
"No plan survives contact with the enemy, right? Von Moltke said that." I'd learned that from the Army somewhere along the way.
Giraud wrinkled his nose. "Von Moltke learned that from Napoleon. Napoleon emphasized having flexible capabilities and exploiting opportunities on the battlefield, instead of trying to stick to detailed plans." He pointed to Skippy. "No plan made by UNEF could have anticipated this opportunity."
There was no place for privacy aboard the Dodo, except for the single
zero gee bathroom that was in steady use. When Skippy pinged me that he wanted to talk, semi privately, I went forward to the cramped cockpit, to float behind the righthand seat. "What is it, Skippy?"
He replied into my earpiece. "Just wanted to say something nice, for a change, and I don't want to be overheard, because that will ruin my street cred."
Street cred? Where the hell was Skippy getting his notions about human culture? "Oh, sure." I didn't know what else to say.
"Your species is remarkably adaptable. The ability to accept new information, new concepts, to not run away screaming or become paralyzed when confronted with shocking changes, is unfortunately too rare among intelligent species. I expected there to be trouble when you revealed the truth about me and our mission, but your people accepted the new situation admirably quickly."
"Huh." Skippy wasn't taking into account that our crew were soldiers. Soldiers get new crap thrown at them in the middle of a mission all the time. One time in Nigeria, I was in a Blackhawk skimming the treetops at 0330, headed to raid a camp of bad guys, when our lieutenant gets a call ten minutes out from the landing zone. The bad guys reached a deal and they were suddenly on our side, our mission then was to protect our new buddies from a force of other bad guys who were sneaking through the jungle to kill them. Apparently the first group of bad guys had been declared traitors by the other ignorant whackos, because they weren't as fanatically crazy as the craziest of whackos. So we landed and set up a perimeter to protect guys we'd been shooting at the day before. Of course, the whole thing had really been a tribal dispute, and both sides tried to ambush us. After we evaced, we had to call in the Air Force to resolve the situation diplomatically with napalm, cluster bombs and fuel-air explosives. When things change, even radically, you look at your buddies, shake your head, shrug, and adapt. That's what you do, as soldiers. Civilians get upset when the menu changes at Applebees.
Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1) Page 30
