Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  "We are already in deep interstellar space. Going further would increase the likeliness of the Kristang's jump engines failing," Skippy said, "however, there would still be-"

  "Skippy," it was my turn to interrupt him, "you can control the jump engines on those Kristang ships?" Desai had given me an idea.

  "Temporarily, yes."

  "And we don't need to send teams aboard those ships, plug you in?" If we did, my plan wouldn't work, no way could we assault multiple Kristang warships.

  "No, not this time. The Thuranin platforms have hardline connections to docked ships, to reduce EM signatures, so I infiltrated the Kristang ship computers shortly after I took control of this ship."

  The next question was the key to my plan. "And how long would it take for the Kristang to charge their jump engines, for a short jump?"

  "Warships always maintain a minimal charge in their jump engines, to escape ambushes." Skippy explained. "All the Kristang ships are capable of an immediate short range jump, right now."

  "Good. How far are we from the nearest gas giant planet?" I asked.

  Desai's mouth formed a silent 'O' as she realized what I was thinking. "You're thinking we jump in close to a gas giant, eject the Kristang and then jump their ships inside the planet, before they can react?"

  "Whoa!" Skippy said derisively. "Whoa, hold on there, monkeys. You can't jump a starship inside a planet, the gravity will distort the exit point so it, oh, huh, I get it. Yeah, duh. That would be very effective in ripping those ships apart, especially since they would be trying to emerge into spacetime already occupied by the planet. Ooh, I've never seen that myself. This is gonna be awesome! Woo-hoo!" He sounded gleeful. "Yes, there is a Saturn-size gas giant well within two jumps from here. In an uninhabited star system. Pilot, course is laid in, ready when the jump engines reach sixty four percent charge."

  "Wait!" I said quickly, before Desai could turn around in her seat. I should have trusted her not to engage the controls without my order, for she held her hands in the air, not poised over the controls. "Skippy, can you eject those ships, get clear, and jump them into this Saturn planet, before they can launch those drones?"

  "Please, Colonel Joe, you insult me. Easy-peasy."

  Chang didn't have any objection, or a better idea. Simms was enthusiastic, and I saw a new respect in her, and Desai's, eyes. We jumped twice through the emptiness of interstellar space, and then, with a press of a button by Desai, the view of black interstellar space in the screens was suddenly replaced by a gray-blue gas giant in the blink of a eye. The planet completely filled the viewscreen, I mean, Skippy must have been showing off his navigational skills, it sure looked like we jumped in really close. I didn't have time to shout an alarm, because the star carrier immediately shuddered as fourteen Kristang ships and the cargo pod of sleeping Thuranin were violently subjected to emergency separation, and then our ship surged forward under normal-space thrust from Desai. Skippy had given her no course instructions other than get the hell out there ASAP, and don't point the ship toward the planet. We could see almost immediate flashes from aft as the Kristang ships unwillingly formed jump points. "Pilot, you can cut thrust. Watch this." Skippy announced excitedly.

  "Watch what?"

  The view screen zoomed to a section of the cloudtops, which were suddenly lit from within. "I jumped all fourteen ships into a hundred cubic kilometers, so the endpoints of their jump entry points overlapped, as insurance that nothing is left of them."

  "Isn't that a bit of overkill?"

  "Overkill is underrated." Skippy said smugly. "Hmm. Uh oh."

  "Uh oh?" The light within the clouds below kept growing, becoming searing in brilliance, and the cloudtops boiled up toward us. Fast. "Uh oh? What the hell did you do, Skippy?"

  "The energy released within the planet was much greater than I anticipated, somewhere way up in the sustained petawatt range. Wow. It’s become self-sustaining. Darn."

  "Darn?" The clouds was racing towards us. "What the hell is a petawatt?" I shouted.

  "Trouble. We are safely out of range. Uh, I think." Skippy's tone of voice didn't fill me with confidence.

  "You think? Desai, move us away from the planet, higher orbit, whatever you call it. Step on it."

  "Aye aye, sir." She said with a big grin on her face. Piloting a giant starship was something she clearly enjoyed. "Pedal to the metal."

  We watched the planet retreat behind us, as the cloudtops boiled rapidly into a truly enormous mushroom shape, and projected high above the atmosphere like a solar flare. Skippy reported excitedly that a significant part of the atmosphere had exceeded escape velocity, and was being permanently blown into space. Enough that the ship's sensors could measure the change in the planet's mass. The atmospheric gas was still climbing, but Desai now had us moving faster, I was confident we weren't going to get swallowed up. "Skippy, what went wrong?"

  "Wrong? That was awesome! Damn! I almost converted that planet into a minor star. I wish we had better sensor coverage."

  "Wrong means, something happened that you didn't plan." I explained slowly. How could it be that I needed to explain anything, to a super-intelligent ancient machine?

  "Oh, sure, if you're going to be picky about it." Skippy said dismissively. "Next time, I'll jump an enemy ship deeper towards the planet's core. But that's no fun, we won't be able to see anything. It would just look like the clouds burped or something lame like that."

  "Sir?' Desai asked, without taking her eyes off the controls. "Should I keep accelerating? We're moving at fifteen thousand kph away from the planet already."

  "Huh? Oh, yeah, you can cut thrust." There was no sense wasting power. Especially since we didn't have a destination in mind yet. "Skippy, are we clear? The Kristang ships are all destroyed, and they didn't get any drones away?"

  "We are clear, Colonel Joe. This took them completely by surprise, and I confused their computers so they couldn't react anyway. They are now a loose cloud of atoms. The cargo pod with the Thuranin got swallowed up and vaporized by the explosion, they're gone also."

  I looked through the glass at Chang and Simms, and gave them a thumbs up. They both nodded. "What's next, Skippy? Now that we have gotten rid of unwanted guests. We're headed to raid the asteroid base, yes?" I should have felt something after destroying the Kristang and Thuranin, but I didn't. No triumph, no guilt, no satisfaction, nothing. Those ships were just objects, I wasn't thinking of the sentient beings who had been aboard. This was very different from firefights in the Nigerian bush, or fighting hamsters on Paradise. Maybe I'd feel something later, after some rack time. Right then, I did not care, as long as the Kristang and Thuranin were no longer a threat.

  "Yes. We wait while our jump engines recharge. I have plotted a long jump so we need a full charge, that will take up to two hours."

  "Desai, you up for using the next couple hours learning to fly this crate?"

  "Yes, sir!"

  "Great. Skippy, plot some points for her to navigate to, or whatever you're supposed to do for pilot training. We’re going out to transit through a wormhole next, right? That wormhole is about eight lightyears from Paradise, based on guesses I heard from our G-2. That's our Intel people, at the division level."

  "I've memorized all your military acronyms, Colonel Joe."

  "Oh, uh, of course you have, sorry about that." Why did I bother explaining anything, to a being who knew everything that was in any sort of data storage device humanity had brought to Paradise? Plus every bit of data the Kristang and Ruhar had about humans. He knew far more about humanity that any human did. Whether he understood it, in context, was another question. "To travel eight lightyears takes about sixteen days on a Thuranin star carrier like this. Unless, uh, there are different types of star carriers? I don't know which ship we travelled on."

  "There are different types, and the Thuranin have battleships, cruisers and what you would call destroyers and frigates, also transports and support ships. All their star carriers have roughly the
same jump capability."

  "Ok, so, two weeks between here and the nearest wormhole-"

  "You mean the wormhole that leads to Camp X-Ray. That is not the closest wormhole to Paradise."

  "It's not?"

  "No." It was maddening when Skippy stuck to the facts, usually I couldn't get him to shut up about anything.

  "Which wormhole are we going to?"

  "The one that is only five lightyears away from Paradise."

  I did some quick mental math. "Ten days, then?"

  "Sure, if you want to poke along like the Thuranin, one wimpy little jump at a time. We're doing it in jumps that are twice as far as normal, and that's only because I need to calibrate the engines, fine-tune them, as you would say. We could go more than twice as far on a jump."

  "I don't understand."

  "That's the first intelligent thing you've said since we met."

  "Welcome back, Skippy, I knew that asshole was in there someplace."

  "I'm ignoring that. The truth, my boy, is the Thuranin stole their supposedly advanced jump drive technology a long time ago, but those arrogant little cyborg pinheads have made zero progress in understanding how it works since then. Morons. The best way to explain it is it's like they stole a car, and they know how to get it started, and how to get the transmission into gear. They have no idea that transmission has multiple gears, but they know the car has a gas pedal, and they've got the pedal to the floor. They're poking along in first gear, with the engine screaming, and it creeps along painfully slowly, but it could go so much faster. Especially since the Thuranin were very bad at copying their stolen technology, and it's like they carved the transmission from a solid block of wood. Idiots. Even without being modified, their crappy copy of a jump drive is capable of much greater performance, with me controlling it."

  "Not that you're bragging or anything."

  "No, I'm very modest. Astonishingly modest, considering how awesome I am."

  "Oh, for sure, your awesome modesty is your most impressive trait." I rolled my eyes at that. "It's amazing how humble you are."

  "Yup. I'm very proud of my humbleness. Besides, as one of you humans said, it ain't bragging if it's true."

  "Uh huh." It continuously amazed me how Skippy knew so much about human history. How did a shiny beer can know quotes from Muhammad Ali? "This making longer jumps, it won't damage the engines? I don't want to get stranded out here. Not that the idea of spending eternity on this ship with you, doesn't sound absolutely wonderful. Because it doesn't."

  "I don't want to spend an eternity looking at your ugly face either. No, the Thuranin control their jumps by forcing far too much energy through the engines, that wears them out. I'll be using a third of the energy to jump more than twice as far. The engines will last much longer. Which is good, because we can't exactly take our stolen pirate ship to a Thuranin repair station."

  "Can us monkeys help with keeping the ship running? You could show us where the jack and spare tire is, in case we get a flat."

  "If we get stuck, you can get out and push."

  I stuck my tongue out at him. Even the smartest human was probably incapable of fixing even a toilet aboard a Thuranin ship, we'd be totally useless if something happened to the engines or any other critical system. Although, if Skippy was going to drag us on a long trip across the galaxy, toilets were going to be a critical system.

  "Ok, so, we're going to jump to a wormhole. How are we going to get through the wormhole? Won't the Kristang, or the Thuranin, or even the Ruhar at this point, have ships guarding the entrance?"

  "How would they do that?"

  "Do what?"

  "Guard the entrance."

  "With, uh, you know, ships. Or, like, a battle station or something like that." For a second, I pictured a Death Star. Only filled with lizards instead of storm troopers.

  "What good would a battle station do? It just sits there."

  I couldn't believe a super intelligent being needed me to explain what a space battle station could do. Particularly since I'd never seen one. Slowly, I explained. "It sits there, in front of the entrance, preventing unauthorized ships from-"

  "Whoa!" Skippy interrupted me. "I see the problem. Huh, you really don't know. Damn, your species is even dumber than I thought."

  "Don't know what?"

  "Wormholes aren't static. They move around. A battle station would be totally useless."

  "Ooooh-kaaaay. No, Mister Smarty Pants, I didn't know that." The burgermeister hadn't mentioned that important detail. "What do you mean, move around?"

  "Oh, boy, here comes me trying to give a physics lecture to a bacterium. What you call wormholes are not physical objects, they are projections into the local spacetime. The projections hop around, just below the speed of light, in kind of a figure eight pattern that covers about a lightyear. A wormhole projection stays in one place for between roughly seventeen to ninety two minutes, then it closes and reappears at the next step along the path, which could be a quarter of a lightyear away. Wormholes follow a set pattern, over the course of a cycle, a wormhole will cover every location along the path, but there are millions of locations. My point is, there is no way the Kristang, or any other species currently in this galaxy, could prevent ships from using a wormhole; it's not practical to cover all those locations. My plan is to jump us close to where a wormhole is going to appear, and see if any other ships are waiting, I know exactly when a wormhole is going to shift to the next location. If it's clear, we wait for the wormhole to open, jump right in front of it, then go through."

  "Huh." I had pictured wormholes as a sort a Stargate thing, a big ring hanging in space, with a glowing center. "That sounds like a good plan. And don't say of course it is. Why don't wormholes stay in one place?"

  "Didn't you already answer that question? Because if a wormhole stays in one place, a species could control it, duh. Also, because the longer a wormhole is open, it takes exponentially more energy to sustain the connection. And a static wormhole would eventually create a local rupture in spacetime."

  "Another good safety tip, then."

  "An excellent safety tip. Probably not one you monkeys need to worry about, in case you're thinking of creating a wormhole out of mud and sticks."

  "Shut up." Every time I was thinking Skippy was Ok, he said something to remind me that, deep down, he was an asshole.

  After the jump away from the wormhole, I called a stand down for the entire crew, they were exhausted, and as Skippy said we were safe, we’d made enough jumps that it was extremely unlikely the Thuranin could find us now. Other than a person in the sickbay, who could nap on the floor there, and a duty officer in the command pilot couch, I wanted everyone to get a solid eight hours of sleep. We were tired, we were emotionally wrung out, and we all needed time to process everything that had happened during a very long and eventful day. For most of the crew, it had started when a Dodo dropped out of the sky onto their logistics base, and four humans came out and stunned the Ruhar. For Chang, Simms, Adams and me, it had started earlier, when we escaped from the Ruhar and stole the Dodo.

  I took the first duty shift, although I was not in any way qualified as a pilot, Skippy had programmed two emergency jumps, and all I would need to do is press a button if trouble appeared. While I sat in the pilot couch, which was too small for Desai and way too cramped for me, I began writing up an after action report on my iPad. Someday, hopefully, I would need to report to authorities on Earth all that had happened, and it was best to do that while it was still fresh in my mind. Damn, there was a lot to write down. I was only halfway through when Chang relieved me three hours later, and I was able to stagger back to my assigned quarters, close to the bridge. After I kicked me shoes off and scrunched up in the small bed, I couldn’t get to sleep. Rather than lay there uselessly, I sat up, turned the light on, and began tapping away on my iPad.

  Skippy’s voice came from the iPad’s speakers. “Colonel Joe, you should be sleeping.”

  “I have a lot to do,
Skippy. Like planning a memorial service for the three people we lost. I don't even know the proper ceremony for Taoism or Hindus." I frowned. The truth was, guilt was keeping me from sleeping.

  "Hindu tradition is cremation." Skippy chipped in helpfully. "I have all available data on human religious rituals."

  "Oh, uh, thanks, Skippy." I could ask Chang and Desai what to do about their countrymen. Matheson's body would remain in storage until we returned to Earth for a proper burial, at home. "This must all seem silly to you."

  "What?"

  "Religious rituals. You know, religion itself."

  "Why would I think that?"

  His answer surprised me, I had expected a smart-ass remark about monkeys worshipping trees. "Because the beings who created you were ancient and super powerful, and uh-"

  "Joe, Joe, Joe." I could visualize Skippy shaking his lid at me. "The Elders were indeed super powerful, they were able to move stars. Several times, when the path of a star was going to disrupt a solar system that the Elders thought could someday bring forth intelligent life, they towed the offending star out of the way. Once, when a blue giant star threatened to go supernova and flood several surrounding solar systems with deadly radiation, the Elders created a wormhole, and transported the star outside the galaxy. They jumped a super massive star two hundred thousand lightyears through a wormhole. Think about that. Your question assumes that beings so powerful, beings who had effectively achieved immortality, such beings would have no use for religion. You are wrong. Again. Why do you think the Elders left us, transcended?"

  "Because," I answered slowly to give myself time to think, "they were bored? With this existence?"

  "No." There was no trace of humor or the usual snarkiness in Skippy's voice. "It was because they had answered all the physical questions about the universe, and when you reach the end of the physical, what is left must be metaphysical. Beyond the natural world lies only the supernatural. The Elders were able to trace time back to the beginning of the universe, and they were left with one question: what lay before? Where did the universe come from? Where did they come from? Physics, even physics so advanced as to touch the realm of magic, has a limit. The Elders transcended because they wanted to know, they needed to know, where they came from. They wanted to commune with God. Or with their concept of God."