Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

"Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of your species who lack the ability to process new facts and adapt, but with humans those are mostly old people, their brains no longer are able to process new information. Or they're just lazy. But with some species, even the young have difficulty with facts that conflict with their rigid belief systems. I am impressed with humans. There, I said it."

  "So, we're not just bacteria?"

  "Don't push your luck. You're bacteria with potential now."

  Thirty seven minutes later, an alarm sounded in the cockpit. "Excellent!" Skippy reported. "Two Kristang ships jumped in, a frigate that is sending us a homing beacon, and a destroyer."

  "Where?" I asked anxiously as Skippy displayed on the bulkhead screen our position relative to Paradise, the two Kristang ships and various Ruhar ships.

  "I have loaded a course into the nav system."

  "Got it, sir." Desai confirmed. "Hold on tight everyone, engaging autopilot."

  I hung on as the Dodo's engines roared and we surged ahead. "Skippy, how far? How long until we rendezvous?" I repeated, an anxious eye on the display. There were a half dozen Ruhar ships that were uncomfortably close.

  "The Kristang frigate is accelerating to match our course, we will meet in three minutes and six point three six seven four nine seconds. Approximately."

  Approximately? Adams and I exchanged an amused glance.

  "Huh," Skippy gave a good imitation of a grunt, "that was good navigating by the lizard pilot, they jumped in about as close as their technology allows. Got to be luck, no slimy lizard is that smart. Colonel Joe, it is going to be close, two Ruhar ships are preparing short range jumps to intercept the Kristang frigate. I couldn't conceal the lizards jumping in, or the Ruhar would realize something is wrong with their sensor systems."

  "Do they see us?"

  "No, they're tracking the frigate. The Kristang destroyer is moving to provide cover for us."

  "Great. And you're sure that once we're aboard the frigate and it jumps away, you can spoof the frigate's nav system so we'll jump to a different location than the destroyer?"

  "What? No, I told you, I need to physically jack in first before I can establish any sort of control of the ship. Duh. Weren't you listening?"

  Holy shit!? "Skippy, what the hell? You said you could-"

  "I said that I could make whatever ship takes us aboard jump to a different location than any ships that are escorting it."

  "Yeah, and? Don't you need to-"

  "Hahahaha! Oh, you're cute, Colonel Joe. You think I need to hack into the lizard's computer to screw with their jump drive? No way, dude! I'm going to distort spacetime at the last picosecond, so their jump drive field skews off course."

  "You can distort spacetime?" Simms asked incredulously.

  "Uh-huh, yeah." Skippy answered flippantly. "It's sort of a hobby. I tried collecting stamps, but messing with the universe is so much more relaxing."

  Simms lifted an eyebrow, and gave me a look that silently told me she understood now why I named the little shithead 'Skippy'.

  The frigate grew closer on the display until suddenly it was right there, looming on top of us, with a docking bay door already open. Skippy let the frigate take control of the Dodo's nav system and guide us aboard, the bay door had only begun to close when the frigate jumped away. "We need to move fast," Skippy urged, "we just jumped, and I threw us off course, now I'm preventing a jump field from forming, the Kristang know something is wrong, for now they think the problem is their jump drive, that's not going to last long."

  The bay doors closed agonizingly slowly, and there was a roar as the bay repressurized. As soon as the air pressure indicator read 80%, we opened the side door and the back ramp. My ears popped and I felt a stabbing pain that was difficult to ignore. "Camera is under my control. It's working," Skippy said, "they're buying our story. Outer door is now unlocked."

  Skippy took control of the light sensors in the docking bay camera, and was feeding a false image to the ship, he was also chatting on the radio with the bridge crew. What he meant by our story was that the false image the Kristang crew saw through the camera was exciting and tempting; a Kristang special forces team coming out of a captured Dodo with a very special item of ancient Elder technology that supposedly had been found on Paradise. It was, according to Skippy, a Bubble Energy Tap, a device that pulled free energy from fluctuations in quantum foam, or something like that. "It's a crude technology, think of it as a battery that never wears out. Trust me, this will impress the stupid lizards," Skippy had explained. Anyway, it worked, the bridge crew unlocked the door to the interior of the ship, and we flew across the bay in the zero gravity, only a few people missed the target and had to be pulled in before they bounced off the wall and floated away. Because Kristang frigates had small crews, and Skippy determined this frigate was short two regular crew members, there was not a crew member at the docking bay when we came in. The bridge crew told Skippy they were sending someone down to meet us, the rest of the crew were busy frantically trying to determine why their jump drive wasn't working.

  Giraud in the lead got the outer door of the airlock open, it was a simple matter of pressing a button then pulling a lever. Inside the airlock, I held Skippy in one hand and jacked the plug into a port in the airlock, while Giraud followed a sequence Skippy had taught him on the airlock's control panel, to force open the inner door while the outer door was still open. This was a dangerous moment, with both doors open, an alarm would sound that even Skippy couldn't squelch yet. The inner door slid open with a bang and a loud alarm began blaring, the twenty two people of the assault team squeezed through the airlock into the corridor as quickly as humanly possible and as soon as the last person was through, I bashed my fist into the button that caused the outer door to slam close and cut off the alarm. That was the signal for Desai to get the Dodo moving, and for our assault team to split up and head toward the bridge and the engineering section.

  The most important task was mine; to plug Skippy into a wall jack. A wall jack that, for a panicked split second of eternity, I couldn't find. In my defense, I was floating upside down near the ceiling, trying to keep out of the way of the assault team, getting bumped, elbowed and once kicked in the face. We were all awkward in zero gee, none of us had training in zero gee combat and we hadn't any opportunity to practice. Aboard the Dodo, I'd made everyone except the pilots practice flipping around, controlled landings on a wall, pushing off with feet and hands. There was not room enough, or time enough in the Dodo for anyone to be confident they could do much more than not puke when they spun around.

  Finally, after an impossibly long two seconds, I spotted the wall plug, at the same time gunfire rang out forward, the Kristang on his way to the docking bay had seen the forward assault team. From the sound, I recognized the buzzing of Ruhar weapons, and the heavier report of a Kristang rifle, then only buzzing. Ignoring distractions, I pulled myself down the wall, took the plug out of my teeth and carefully inserted it in the wall jack. "Are you in?"

  "Busy," was Skippy's only reply, and considering his lightning fast processing speed that concerned me. Then, "I'm in. We're good. Ship's systems are in my control. Ejecting docking bay doors." There was a shudder, as Skippy used an emergency procedure to blow the doors outward, rather than retracting them to the sides, we couldn't wait for them to cycle normally. "Dodo is on the move."

  The ship lurched violently, bouncing me off the wall. Skippy said he had control, the ship should not have been able to move! "What the hell was-"

  "The Dodo impacted the docking bay doorway, there is substantial damage to the Dodo. It is mission effective."

  Desai had misjudged her exit, in an unfamiliar vehicle, complicated by air escaping from the blown docking bay. Skippy judged the Dodo could still accomplish its mission, which was to fly to the front of the frigate and blast the ship's bridge with the Dodo's guns. The Kristang, who were long used to piracy between and within clans, had designed their ships against borders like us, al
though the designers had been thinking of rival Kristang factions, not primitive humans. The door to the bridge was heavily armored, heavily enough that breaching that door would blow a hole in the ship and expose our people to vacuum. As long as the Kristang were behind that door, they could prevent us from using the ship, they could even disable it or self-destruct it, regardless of Skippy being jacked in. It was almost impossible to seize the bridge of a Kristang warship.

  So, we weren't going to seize it, we were going to blast it to pieces from the outside. If the Dodo was still functional, if Desai could fly it effectively with almost no experience, and if she could control the Dodo's guns enough to hit the bridge without blowing apart the rest of the ship. If. A very big if.

  There was gunfire forward and aft, people were shouting and screaming someone set off a flash-bang grenade, then the ship shook violently again. And again, and again. "Captain Desai has succeeded in destroying the bridge. Also part of the ship's nose and ten meters of the starboard side aft of the bridge."

  "Shit! Is that bad?"

  "She did well for her lack of experience. The additional damage will be convincing evidence this ship was struck by a Ruhar stealth mine, and will not affect ship function for our purpose."

  It has been said that a commander has the toughest job in combat, because after people are trained and plans are made, the commander has to sit back and watch, unable to do much to affect the outcome, while his people fight. In my very limited experience, that saying is a hundred percent bullshit. The commander does not have the toughest job, the toughest job is done by the grunts carrying rifles, exposing themselves to enemy fire. The grunts do the fighting and dying. That's the toughest job. The commander has the loneliest job, the job that makes you feel guilty and useless that you aren't out there on the front line, doing something useful for your buddies. After the combat is over, I always felt like things might have gone better if I'd been there, that maybe I'd have seen the enemy and shouted a warning before someone got shot, maybe I'd have killed the enemy before they got one of our guys. Maybe I could have made things better. Or maybe I'd simply get killed. Either way, I'd be doing something. What I did, after jacking Skippy in, was hold onto a wall and try to follow the battles forward and aft on my zPhone, and it was beyond chaotic, I wasn't able to get a picture of what was happening until the fighting was over. So much for me 'commanding' anything.

  Our losses were four dead and three seriously injured in taking the ship. Four dead and three injured out of twenty one in the assault teams. A third of our force was now gone or combat ineffective. In one battle. In taking one ship.

  Take the ship we did, it was ours. Giraud had only one casualty in taking the ship's control center, Private Arun Kurien of the Indian Army died from being shot by one of the two Kristang who were blocking access to the control center. All the other casualties were in Chang's team that seized the engineering compartment. Chang's team had the toughest job, they had to kill five Kristang who were motivated and desperate to prevent their ship from being captured. Three of those Kristang were killed in the initial firefight when we had some advantage of surprise, the remaining two were much more difficult. One of them managed to get to a suit of powered armor, despite Skippy jamming the door of the locker where the suits were kept, this Kristang had the armor almost on and partly powered up, when three people fired blindly into the compartment, giving cover for Chang to throw in a grenade. The Kristang was tough, he was still trying to get the suit buttoned up after the grenade hit, it took concentrated fire to take him out.

  The worst problem was the last Kristang. This one must have realized he was the only one left, despite Skippy shutting down their comm system, and he decided to blow up the ship rather than surrender. Skippy warned Chang that he needed to stop that Kristang now, now now now, before the Kristang was able to breach the reactor containment. Despite Skippy doing everything he could, the controls to dump the reactor plasma were manual, not anything Skippy could interfere with.

  Chang told me what happened; when the assault team had already lost two people killed trying to get at the Kristang in the narrow space he was hiding, Sergeant Yu Qishan pulled the pins on two grenades and launched himself around the corner, dying when the Kristang shot him in the head. That last Kristang also died when the grenades exploded and blew a hole in the ship's hull, sucking both the Kristang and Sergeant Yu into space. Almost sucked most of Chang's assault team into space, except a bulkhead automatically slammed down to prevent further loss of air in the engineering section.

  Chang actually tried to console me, though Sergeant Yu was one of his own men. "He knew the survival of humanity depended on stopping that Kristang from destroying the reactor. He did his duty. We will honor him when we get home."

  He was right. I still felt like shit about it.

  In the aftermath of the battle, Skippy opened the portside docking bay door so we could take the damaged Dodo aboard, and a shaken Desai when immediately to the ship's control center to get a crash course in flying a Kristang frigate. My first instinct was to call a halt, let everyone recover, and most importantly, tend to the wounded. Simms and Skippy urged me to continue with the plan, right away, we had not a moment to lose. Simms assured me she was seeing to the wounded, they had been brought to the frigate's limited sickbay, and there wasn't anything I could do to help them. With the paltry medical supplies we'd brought with us, there wasn't much anyone could do for them. The best thing I could do, Skippy said, was continue with the plan, and capture a Thuranin star carrier, where the wounded could be tended to with the Thuranin's amazingly advanced medical technology. Wounds could be healed, limbs even regrown, Skippy assured me, once we could put our injured soldiers in Thuranin healing tanks. It felt wrong, I swallowed my pride and let my people do their jobs.

  While Desai pressed buttons under Skippy's direction, programming a jump, I looked around the control center in amazement. We had a ship. A starship. Us. Grubby, low-tech, ignorant monkeys from Earth. A starship.

  Damn.

  CHAPTER TWELVE MERRY BAND OF PIRATES

  "Did it work?" I asked Desai.

  "Sir?"

  "The jump. Did it work? Did we jump? To the right place?" The stars in the display had shifted. Or I thought they shifted. Star fields surprisingly all looked the same. It wasn't like a sci fi movie, where all starships were somehow backlit by a big, vividly glowing colorful nebula. The main display wasn't any help, because I didn't have any reference point. We were a tiny dot in the middle of nowhere before the jump, now we were a tiny dot in the middle of nowhere after the jump. It could be the middle of the same nowhere, for all I knew.

  She held her hands up, palms open, then gestured at the confusing displays. "Honestly, I have no idea. Mister Skippy?"

  "Huh? Oh, sorry, I was busy. Yup, it worked fine. Of course it did. I would have told you if it didn't. I've been transmitting our Kristang IFF codes. I don't detect any other ships in the area yet."

  "Could they have left already? Because we were late to the rendezvous point?" Simms asked.

  "Sure, we were late to the original rendezvous point, this is the alternate point, it's the correct location for this time, duh. This ship's sensors operate at the speed of light, and we just got here, so the, oh, there it is! I have the beacon from the Thuranin star carrier. Pilot, new course is loaded into the navigation system."

  "Colonel?" Desai looked back at me.

  "Engage." I ordered. I needed to think of something original to say. Warp factor five was not an option, unfortunately. The ship swung around about forty five degrees which made me dizzy, and the engines fired. Fired hard. It was good that everyone was strapped in. Damn, it felt like someone was sitting on my chest. It must be worse for our wounded. "Skippy," I grunted, "is this necessary?"

  "I'm not showing off, if that's what you're asking. The Thuranin wish to jump away quickly, their message ordered us to rendezvous at maximum speed. We're going to flip around and decelerate soon, so hang on. Also,
when we get within half a lightsecond, the Thuranin will take control of our navigation system, to bring us safely onto an attachment point. That is standard practice. I am running this ship's navigation system within one of my subroutines so the Thuranin will think they have full access. But they won't."

  "How will we know if the Thuranin accept our IFF codes?" Chang asked.

  "They already have. I'm chatting with them, and the local Kristang commander right now. It's a slow conversation, because the signal travels at lightspeed. They accept our story about being thrown off course by a Ruhar stealth mine, they can see the damage to this ship. Don't be alarmed, we're going to cut thrust in three, two, one, now. We'll coast for twelve minutes before we flip over. This, uh, would be a good time to use the bathroom, hint, hint."

  "Oh, good point." I opened the intercom and advised the crew what was happening.

  It was a long twelve minutes, drifting through space toward a technologically superior enemy ship that could squash our ship like a bug. Skippy had better know what he was doing, or it was going to be game over real soon.

  Unlike our assault on the Kristang frigate, our plan to capture a Thuranin star carrier depended entirely, one hundred percent, on Skippy. We humans were simply along for the ride, until Skippy firmly seized control of the ship and all systems aboard. The difference between the two plans, was, ironically, the Thuranins' advanced technology compared to the Kristang. According to Skippy, the Thuranin's cyborg nature made them highly reliant on networked computers; computers which the Thuranin obsessively protected from any possibility of being hacked. Any possibility, that is, except for the utter magnificence of Skippy. Even the Maxohlx overlords of the Thuranin had a very difficult time breaching Thuranin data system security, but Elder technology was beyond the most fevered imaginations of the Maxolhx.

  According to Skippy.

  Skippy, an ancient, alien AI I didn't entirely trust. Not that I didn't trust him to do what he said he was going to do, since he needed us as much, or more, than we needed him. What I didn't trust was not his ability, but his judgment. He was an amazingly arrogant and absentminded little punk-ass beer can. So, we had cooked up a backup plan, a plan Skippy huffed was not necessary.