Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  "Whoa." I couldn't think of anything else to say.

  "You make the same mistake most young species do when thinking about the Elders; you consider them to be only mythical, almost god-like beings. They were real people, like any other. At one point, they were as dumb as you monkeys, but they learned and evolved into something wondrous. I remember them as wise, kind, powerful, gentle people. I miss them, and I seek the Collective in order to reconnect with some part of them. But I know they are not gods."

  "You're right, Skippy, I hadn't thought of them as people." I hadn't thought of the Elders much at all, in fact, since so little was known about them. "What were they like?"

  "Unfortunately, I can't tell you. It's annoying. I have memories of them, at the back of my mind, but when I try to picture them, I can't, not consciously. And my programming won't allow me to tell you anything that I do know. What bothers me is I can't tell if that is part of my original programming, or it's a glitch. Which is another reason I need to contact the Collective."

  "We'll do that, Skippy, I promised you, we'll find them." My eyelids felt so heavy, I couldn’t keep them open. “Thanks, Skippy, I’m going to get some sleep now. Talk to you later.”

  Over the next days, we settled into a routine. While the Flying Dutchman jumped, charged engines and jumped again around us, we sorted out living arrangements, set up a dining facility in a cargo bay, got another cargo bay cleared out so it could be used as a gym, assigned a duty roster for the crew, including me, and we explored the ship, and tried to learn as much as we could about it. Simms had the bright idea to tear bedding out of the Flower, so it could be laid on the floor of our Thuranin sleeping quarters for the tallest of the crew. When a big Kristang mattress was offered to me, I declined, then found one in my quarters next to the bridge anyway. I didn’t protest, that damned short Thuranin bed was killing my back.

  The second night I went to sleep in my quarters, Skippy told me there was a surprise in one of the cabinets. "Holy crap, Skippy." I exclaimed when I opened the cabinet. It was full, jammed full, of plastic tubes, each about a third full. "What the hell is all this?"

  "Flavor experiments. There's a label printed into the tube on each one."

  Looking more closely at a tube, I saw 'Chocolate #14' in tiny print. "Fourteen types of chocolate?"

  "Twenty two, actually. Like I said, chocolate is a very complex flavor. Also I tried multiple types of butterscotch, caramel, strawberry, curry, jalapeno, cheddar, banana, apple cinnamon, salsa, and more, there's a list on your phone if you care to read it, which I know you won't. I am not confident of the fruit flavors, if you want me to be honest."

  Carefully popping the cap off the tube, I sniffed it. "How many of these tubes is a meal?"

  "Depends on your level of exercise, as a rule for a male your size, one and a half full tubes is sufficient, three times a day."

  Sniffing it again, I tried to decide between gulping it down before I could taste it, and taking a sip. Since I had volunteered to act as a taste tester for the crew, I tipped the tube until a couple drops slid into my mouth. "Not bad, not bad. Reminds me of a Swiss Miss hot cocoa packet that got left in a hunting cabin for a lot of years, until someone found it in the back of a drawer. Stale and musty, and the little marshmallows have turned into crumbly rocks."

  Skippy laughed. "I didn't realize you were a sludge connoisseur, Joe."

  "Smoothie, Skippy, call it a smoothie." Sludge had an unpleasant mouth feel, both oily, chalky and somehow grainy at the same time.

  "Try chocolate number six, my taste model predicts you'll like that one better."

  "Got to finish this one first. Yum."

  "No need for that, we have plenty of sludge aboard, enough for years."

  "Oh, wonderful." Number six did taste better, I compared them side by side, alternating sips. "You're right, six is more of a dark chocolate, and it has less of a chalky aftertaste. And less oily, more of a silky mouthfeel."

  "Excellent! Drink up, Joe, only twenty more types of chocolate to go."

  "Tell you what," I couldn't face the thought of another twenty sludges right then. What I wanted to do is gulp a couple down quickly and get it over with. "Tell me the, like, six chocolates you think taste the worst. People like different things, so what I think is the best chocolate may not be someone else's favorite, but I can eliminate the truly nasty ones." The last thing I wanted was for someone's first sip of sludge to turn them off to the whole idea. "And identifying the bad ones will help you calibrate your taste model, right?"

  "Good thinking, Joe," Skippy gave me some rare praise, "guessing what tastes good to humans has actually been an interesting challenge for me. And that ain't easy."

  "Glad to help keep boredom away. Skippy, I have to say I'm truly impressed, that chocolate number six is pretty good, I could sort of enjoy that for breakfast. You did a good job on that, I was dreading the sludge idea, and now it's not so bad. Before I change my mind," or decide I was no longer hungry, "what chocolate do you think is the worst?"

  Sludges, and that's what the crew decided to call it, because we're soldiers and that's what we do, weren't popular with the crew, they weren't a disaster either. And since we were soldiers, we made do, and came up with flavor combinations, the same way we mixed and matched MREs to make flavors the military never intended. One chocolate sludge plus one banana sludge was a chocolate-banana. Coconut sludge plus curry sludge, mixed and poured over MRE chicken and heated up, made an approximation of a Thai dish. Everyone agreed the fruit flavor sludges were the worst, although if they mixed the nasty strawberry with the bland banana, it actually tasted pretty good. This unpredictability of human taste preferences drove Skippy batshit crazy sometimes, he simply could not, for all his awesome processing power, get his taste model to work with reliable accuracy. It helped that, after a few days, he was able to eliminate the oily mouth feel and the chalkiness, the grainy or gritty part couldn't be fixed as that was necessary for digestive fiber, according to Skippy. The crew found ample opportunity to grouse about the 'food' aboard the Dutchman, something I thought encouraging. People needed something to complain about, complaining was a bonding activity, and it wasn't a serious hit to morale. A sludge in the morning, sludge for lunch, and people looked forward to 'real' food like an MRE for dinner. The crew, including Chang, Simms, Desai and Giraud, tried to get me to eat some real food, but I settled for an occasional cracker or cookie, trying to set a good example. When the crew saw the 'old man', which incredibly was me, stuck with sludge, they didn't feel so bad about subsisting on it two times a day.

  Besides, I was holding out for a cheeseburger and I was accepting no stinkin' substitutes.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN SPACE SUITS

  Simms pinged me the next day while I was in the gym, I was needed on the bridge. When I got there, Simms started to get out of the captain's chair, I waved for her to sit. As the duty officer, the chair was hers. "What is it, Major?"

  "Colonel, Skippy wants to divert us from a direct course to the next wormhole."

  "Skippy?" I asked.

  "We need to get close to a Thuranin battlegroup, so I can access current intel. Right now I'm guessing at disposition of forces in this sector, that makes it dangerous for us to be wandering around the galaxy in our pirate ship."

  Simms explained her objection. "To avoid danger, he wants to get closer to a Thuranin battlegroup. I thought this merited your attention."

  "Good call," I agreed. "You do, uh, see the problem, Skippy? Right now, all the Thuranin know is one of their star carriers has gone missing. Aren't they going to get concerned when we mysteriously show up on their doorstep, then jump away? You do plan to jump us away, right?"

  "Yes, of course, dumdum, and I have a plan for that. If I have to explain everything to you, we'll never get anything done. Uh!" He shushed me as I was about to speak. "Let me talk before you waste my time with stupid questions. When we jump in, I'll alter our jump signature and engine emissions to make us appear to be a Jeraptha
light cruiser, which is the type of ship the Jeraptha commonly use to shadow enemy battlegroups. Our stealth field will disguise the hull outline enough that the Thuranin sensors won't detect that we're a star carrier, if we don't linger too long in one spot. And we won't. Genius, huh?"

  I wasn't convinced. "Won't the Thuranin send ships to attack us?"

  "Of course they will, a Thuranin battlegroup keeps frigates and destroyers on alert to chase away enemy ships. Not a problem, we'll hop around with micro jumps until I've had enough time to break into the database of their command ship."

  "Hop around?" I shared a glance with Desai. “I thought ships took a long time to recharge their engines between jumps?”

  Skippy replied smugly. “Most ships do, I reprogrammed our jump engines so they now work so efficiently, they can perform small jumps on a partial charge. You're welcome, by the way.”

  “Perform multiple jumps on a partial charge, which a real Jeraptha light cruiser can’t do, right?”

  “Nope. The Jeraptha aren’t quite as stupid as the Thuranin, but their engines aren’t much better. Another example of my awesomeness.”

  “You’re kind of missing the point, Your Royal Awesomeness. If we’re doing things a Jeraptha light cruiser can’t do, the Thuranin are going to figure out real quick that we are not a Jeraptha light cruiser.”

  “Shit.” Skippy said simply.

  I winked at Desai. “Yeah, shit. I thought you’re supposed to be a genius?”

  “I’m not a military strategist, Colonel Joe, that’s supposed to be you. Ok, hmm, how to fix this? Uh, all right, how about this? Each time we jump in, I’ll slightly alter the jump signature to make us look like a different Jeraptha warship. It is common for the Jeraptha to use multiple picket ships to shadow an enemy force.”

  “That’ll work. How long will we need to hang around the Thuranin, until you have the info you need?"

  "Oh, a couple minutes to half an hour, depends. The closer to the command ship we jump in, the quicker I can get the data we need. It's a trade off; either we jump in close a couple times, or we jump in further away more times, when we're exposed longer."

  I looked at Simms, and she nodded. "It's a judgment call, then," she said.

  A judgment call neither Simms nor I were qualified to make, and Skippy knew it. Passing the buck to Desai would be the coward's way out. "Uh huh. Skippy, I assume you'll have a series of options programmed into the nav system, and you'll advise the pilot which jump we should make, right, based on what the Thuranin are doing?"

  "Yup, you got it." Surprisingly, he resisted the temptation to make a smartass remark about my intelligence, or lack of it.

  "All right then, if you think we need this intel, then we'll do it. One condition; I want a jump option that will take us safely far away, not only a micro jump, if the pilot or duty officer think's the ship is in danger. More danger than usual."

  "Yeah, sure, that's fair enough. Don't go panicking on me, agreed? We don't want to do this more than once if we don't have to."

  "Pilot?" I asked Desai, "are you comfortable with that?" As the words left my mouth, I knew I'd put Desai in a difficult position. What I should have done is ask if she had any different ideas.

  "Yes, Colonel. We have an emergency jump option at all times, on a different button here," she pointed to a silver button on the top right of her control panel. "I worked that out with Mister Skippy when we were doing our first series of jumps. The safety jump option is updated every time we jump."

  "Oh." I should have known that. "Excellent work, then, Pilot. Skippy, you know where a Thuranin battlegroup is?"

  "I know where one is likely to be, and several other strong possibilities. We will be approaching in seventeen hours."

  That was right in the middle of Chang's next shift as duty officer, I'd need to tell him that I'd be taking over the bridge then. We'd developed a good working relationship, I didn't want to screw it up.

  I came back to the bridge half an hour before we jumped to where Skippy thought we would find a Thuranin battlegroup. We jumped in, spent a tense ten minutes listening with passive sensors, with Desai ready to jump us safely away, until Skippy determined there were no Thuranin ships within range. He activated our active scanners, and quickly determined, based on thin clouds of atoms that did not naturally occur in deep interstellar space, that Thuranin ships had been in the area, recently. Skippy made a guess where they'd gone, and his first two guesses were wrong. His third guess was spot on, too spot on. We emerged from the jump in the middle of the battlegroup, less than two thousand miles from the nearest ship, that was way too close even for Skippy's bravado. After Desai initiated a microjump to a safe distance, we began hopping around the battlegroup, with a pair of Thuranin destroyers trying to chase us away. At first, it was alarming, then annoying for the pair of destroyers to pop up near us, firing missiles, railguns and particle beams. We had to jump away before the Dutchman got seriously hit, twice we took glancing particle beam hits that our shields easily deflected, and Skippy complained that we were jumping away too soon. After a few jumps, Skippy found a pattern in the tactics the Thuranin were using to pursue us, and once he adjusted to compensate, the two destroyers never came close again. Still, I thought Skippy was pushing it, or showing off, we kept popping up uncomfortably close to the command ship, close enough that a battleship and a pair of heavy cruisers joined the pursuit.

  "Skippy, come on, do you have enough data yet?"

  "Hold your horses, Colonel Joe, the fun is only getting started. We can, uh oh. Pilot! Emergency jump! Now!"

  Desai didn't hesitate, the display flashed and the Thuranin battlegroup disappeared. "Jump successful, Colonel, we are-"

  "Jump again, Pilot, jump! Option 4, initiate!" Skippy shouted.

  The screen flashed again, and again we popped up somewhere in deep interstellar space. "Done." Desai reported, her eyes wide. "Colonel, we only have power for one microjump," she warned. The bottom of the main display showed a red bar for the jump engine charge. It read only eighteen percent.

  "Skippy, what the hell is going on? Why the two jumps?"

  "I think we're Ok now. I think."

  "We'd better be," I said fearfully, willing the jump charge bar to slide above eight percent. It wasn't moving. "What happened? Did that battleship get too close?"

  "Battleship? Pthththth!" Skippy made a raspberry sound. "No way! Those Thuranin pinheads were chasing their tails, I was programming microjumps closer than we needed just to screw with them. No, the Thuranin didn't pose any real danger, they're too predictable. What happened was while I was downloading data from the command ship, I detailed part of my processing capacity to skim through the data, and I learned that the Maxohlx are so alarmed about the Thuranin's military setbacks in this sector, they have assigned a Maxohlx cruiser to join the battlegroup."

  "A Maxohlx starship?" Desai exclaimed. "Where was it?" The protocol was for Thuranin ships to appear green on the navigation displays, Kristang ships were red, Ruhar ships yellow, Jeraptha ships blue, and so on. The color for Maxolhx ships was orange. There wasn't been any orange symbols on the display.

  "That's the problem, I didn't detect any Maxohlx ship in range. The Thuranin data indicates a Maxolhx cruiser joined the battlegroup two days ago, but it has been intermittently jumping away, and the Thuranin don't know where it is now. I am not confident in the ability of this ship's crappy sensors to detect a Maxohlx ship that has engaged its full stealth capabilities. At this point, I do not want to tangle with a Maxolhx warship, I am not sufficiently familiar with the Maxohlx current level of technology. It would be prudent, in the immediate future, to avoid Thuranin fleet concentrations. As soon as we can, we should perform a substantial jump to clear this area. The engines will have sufficient charge for a moderate jump in thirty seven minutes."

  The stupid progress bar was killing me, it still only showed eight percent. "Did you get the data we need?"

  "Huh? Oh, yeah, sure, no problem, I'm still skimmin
g through it. We have a complete view of the disposition of Thuranin forces in the entire sector, future war plans, all the good stuff. With this, it will be easy to avoid them. Oh, and I also found confirmation the Thuranin are pulling back from Paradise, permanently, they're abandoning that entire wormhole cluster. It would have been an outlier to their main territory anyway, the Thuranin were never enthusiastic about retaking Paradise, that was a Kristang operation. It seems that because an Elder starship crashed on Paradise a long time ago, the Kristang were eager to resume searching for Elder technology. Too bad they didn't find anything useful the first time they had the planet. Hahahahaha! Stupid lizards."

  The idea of a Maxolhx cruiser lurking out there, a ship we might not be able to detect until its weapons blew through our shields, scared the hell out of me. My plan had been to turn the duty officer shift back to Chang once we'd jumped away from the Thuranin, now I'd be stuck in the chair another hour, to make sure we'd jumped safely away and the ship had not suffered any damage from stressing the engines with multiple jumps. Skippy insisted the critical engines were fine, his assurances didn't assure me. Him admitting that he had jumped us closer to the Thuranin than necessary, just to screw with them, didn't make me confident in his judgment right then.

  The jump engines achieved sufficient charge, and Desai asked whether she should initiate jump, I held off another ten minutes to build up a safety margin. After the jump, and Skippy peevishly running a system diagnostic that I insisted on, I turned the chair over to Chang and retreated to a bathroom, where I almost barfed. Everyone on the ship, everyone on Earth, were counting on me, I was doing the best I could, and it wasn't good enough. Even with Skippy's stores of knowledge, there was too much we didn't know. We'd almost stumbled on top of a Maxohlx warship that had even Skippy frightened. Too many unknowns. And too much at stake.