Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  Splashing cold water on my face helped settle my nerves, I no longer felt nauseous. In the Thuranin bathroom, I had to bend down to reach the sink, and my hands were trembling. Through my zPhone, I called Skippy. "Hey, Skippy, we need to talk."

  "Sure." He responded immediately, despite the fact that I knew he was talking to a half dozen other people, and running the ship, and decrypting the petabytes of data he'd stolen from the Thuranin command ship at the same time. "Wazzup?"

  "I need you to be serious for a minute, can you do that?"

  "If I have to. You're worried about something, I can tell by your voice."

  Likely he was also monitoring my blood pressure, skin reactions, eye movements, and whatever else he felt like looking at. "You said you were screwing with the Thuranin."

  "Yeah, that was fun."

  "No, it wasn't. It put the Dutchman in unnecessary danger."

  "Ah, I see the problem now. You're upset. Joe, we were in no additional danger. Once I got into the Thuranin command network, I knew ahead of time the actions of the Thuranin ships that were trying to chase us away. Me having some fun didn't affect us."

  "This time. Didn't affect us this time, that you know of. You didn't know there was a Maxohlx cruiser out there somewhere, ready to blow this ship to pieces. Skippy, here's the problem; if something goes bad out here, you'll be stranded in deep space, until you can fake a distress call or something and lure a starship here. That sucks for you, stuck alone for a while again, but you survived it before, you'll survive it again. The stakes for us monkeys are a lot higher. When you put us at risk, you're risking my entire species. Everyone. My whole planet, and everyone and everything on it. We may be bacteria to you, and maybe you're being generous to consider us bacteria. To us, to me, this is everything. We risked a lot to come out here, now we're risking the survival of humanity. If this mission fails, if we can't shut down the wormhole, if the Kristang stay in control of Earth, then we lose, I lose, everything. Do you understand that?"

  There was a moment of uncharacteristic silence, then "Joe, is that a tear?"

  "I splashed some water on my face," I responded angrily, and wiped a tear away with my sleeve. Thinking of my family, my home town, friends, the cool dark woods where I'd spent so much time, thinking even of my parent's dog, had gotten me emotional. They were all counting on me, and they didn't know it.

  "I'm sorry," he said softly. "I do understand what's at stake for you, for all of you. We made a deal, I'm going to keep my end of the bargain, I am going to shut down that wormhole. And I'm sorry to alarm you, we truly were not in any additional danger. But I won't do that again, I promise."

  "Thank you. Another subject; do the Thuranin know about this ship? Do they know they lost a star carrier?"

  Skippy's voice went back to normal, he was happy to change the subject. "Modifying our jump signature worked, I was monitoring the command ship's internal communications, they believed they were being shadowed by three Jeraptha light cruisers. They do know the Dutchman is missing, they don't know why. The good news is the Thuranin also lost another two ships, a frigate and a cruiser, around the same time and in the same area where the Dutchman disappeared, the Jeraptha have task forces hunting down Thuranin survivors. Our secret is safe for now. The commander of that Thuranin battlegroup sent a request to their fleet headquarters, requesting permission to detach several ships to search for the Dutchman, the fleet denied that request. They don't want to commit any more resources to this area, they're writing this ship off. The operation the Jeraptha launched in this sector, that resulted in the Ruhar recapturing Paradise, has succeeded beyond expectations, the Thuranin have been forced to redeploy their forces. My analysis is that the Jeraptha originally planned to halt their offensive by now, because of their unexpected success they are pressing their advantage and pulling in ships from other sectors. This operation had developed into a major, major fleet action across the entire sector. That's good for us, because the attention of the Thuranin, and Kristang, will be elsewhere."

  "All right then." Thuranin bathrooms didn't have mirrors, they must have thought vanity about external appearance to be an undesirable holdover from their purely biological past. No way did I want to go back on the bridge looking like I'd almost been sick. A shaky commander was not good for crew morale. To make a mirror, I shined the zPhone screen on my shirt, and checked my face as best I could. The face that looked back was tired, yes, I could blame it on that. Straightening my shoulders, I opened the door and walked back down the corridor and onto the bridge. Chang nodded and stepped out of the chair for me.

  "Colonel, no sign of a Maxohlx ship out there?" I asked. Chang and Skippy would have notified me right away, I was making conversation to avoid awkwardness.

  Chang shook his head. "No sign of any pursuit. We're charging engines," he pointed to the display that indicated a current twelve percent charge, "for another series of jumps. Mister Skippy reports that the wormhole we intended to use may be used by Maxohlx ships in the near future, we have altered course for a different wormhole. ETA to the next jump is three hours, twelve minutes," that was also shown as a countdown on the display, "and we'll be approaching the wormhole in four days."

  "Four days? Let's make sure everyone gets plenty of rest, then, we'll need-"

  Skippy interrupted us. "Goddamn it!" Skippy shouted. "Shit! You got to be kidding me! Fucking pinheads! Sneaky fucking little green men!"

  "Jesus Christ, Skippy, what is it?" I asked, panicked, and sat down quickly in the chair. Chang dashed out of the bridge to his duty station in the CIC, just beyond the glass. There wasn't anything new on the displays, certainly no glaring orange symbol for a Maxolhx ship. Desai turned to me and held up her hands in confusion, a finger poised over the silver button to activate a preprogrammed emergency microjump away. I held up a finger to hold her. "Are we in danger? Immediate danger?"

  "Us?" Skippy sounded distracted. "No, we're in no danger. Not, uh, any more than usual. Who is in trouble are those rotten, stinking, sneaky Thuranin." Skippy was angry, genuinely angry. His liberal use of swear words had startled me, it was unlike him, in my limited experience. "If I get my hands on them again, I'm going to make them wish they'd never tried to be clever."

  "What did they do to you?"

  "Me? They didn't do anything to me. Not directly. They made me look like a fool." There was bitterness in his voice. "They hid something important from me. Something I should have known, should have expected. Damn it!"

  He was rambling, it alarmed me. Scanning the displays again, there was still nothing new that I could see. Desai moved her finger off the jump button and rested in on the panel right next to the button. What the hell could Skippy be raging about? The Thuranin task force was still where it was supposed to be. No anomalous lights were on the display. In fact, no other lights were on the display, we were in deep interstellar space, the only other thing likely to be around were scattered individual hydrogen atoms, and they didn't appear on the display.

  Skippy took a deep breath, at least he appeared to take an audible deep breath. "When I cracked their command ship's encryption, surprisingly sophisticated by the way, they must have stolen it from the Maxohlx, I can't imagine the Maxohlx would have given it to them. No match for my incredible powers, of course, it was, though, a minor challenge to me, sort of like doing a crossword puzzle. Not a tough crossword puzzle, you know, like when the clue is about something obscure like 17th century Hungarian poetry, unless you're an expert on 17th century Hungarian poetry, or ancient Hungarian literature in general. Really, if you studied any kind of Renaissance or Baroque era European literature-"

  "Skippy!"

  "Huh? Oh, a little off topic there, I guess. Where was I?"

  Where was I? Desai looked at me and I rolled my eyes. "You can store all human knowledge in a tiny part of your memory, and you can't remember what you were talking about ten seconds ago?"

  "Ten seconds in your slow time sense, Joe, for me, entire species could have ev
olved, thrived and gone extinct in that time. My mind wanders. Oh, yeah, I was talking about their encryption. I dug into the database on the Thuranin command ship and found something interesting, very interesting. It's not widely known even among the Thuranin, their leadership keeps this information closely guarded, and I can see why, because if this secret gets out, the Thuranin will lose a big advantage. The Thuranin have planted a nanovirus aboard many, if not most, Kristang warships. Any Kristang warship that hitches a ride on a Thuranin star carrier gets infected during the process, if the star carrier is equipped with the nanovirus. The Dutchman is equipped to generate the nanovirus, before I took control, this ship's AI had already determined that the Flower was infected, so it never activated the nanovirus controller. This ship's crew wasn't aware the nanovirus even exists."

  "Interesting, I guess, what is a nanovirus?" What I really wanted to know was why Skippy had gotten so upset about it.

  "It's a method of linking atoms by quantum, hmm, damn, I can't tell you monkeys about that. You wouldn't understand it anyway. Think of it as a way to preprogram elements of a Kristang ship so that, when the Thuranin activate the system, the atoms assemble into nanomachines that can take control of the ship. Physical control, not only control through software. Until the nanovirus is activated, there is no way the Kristang, at their pathetic level of technology, could ever know their ship is infected. That's important because there are simple ways of scrambling the nanovirus, to render it inert. Even the Kristang could do that. And the Thuranin wouldn't know the nanovirus on a particular Kristang ship had been scrambled, until they tried to activate it."

  "Great. This is important to us, how?"

  "Because," Skippy said slowly, "if I'd known about the nanovirus, I could have used it to take control of the Flower. We wouldn't have needed to jack me into a wall port. And the nanovirus allows me to take complete control, even parts of a Kristang ship that are hardened against cyber attack. I'm sorry, Joe, if I had known about the nanovirus, we wouldn't have needed to fight our way through the Flower compartment by compartment."

  Ah. He was feeling guilty about the people we'd lost. "You didn't know, Skippy."

  "I should have! This is an old and relatively simple technology, I should have anticipated the Thuranin would have discovered it, or stolen it, purchased it, along the way."

  "You didn't know, you can only work with what you know."

  "Still feel bad about it," he grumbled. "What bugs me is I should have scanned the Flower after we took control, I would have detected the quantum links. I can't explain why I didn't do that. Joe, this is where my inability to access sections of my memory concerns me."

  "Mister Skippy," Desai asked, "does this mean you can remotely control Kristang ships in the future?"

  "Yes! Yes, I can, as long as we're close enough. The Thuranin are constantly changing their control codes, and their encryption is pretty good, so I need to bypass the Thuranin control system and activate the nanovirus directly. Short answer: yes, I can do it. Long answer: meh, it depends. I wouldn't want to count on it in a critical combat situation."

  I gave an exaggerated shrug. "And, once again, you are filling me with confidence, Skippy."

  "Hey, it's better than what we had before. And I'm working on it, the technology the Thuranin are using isn't quite right, it's corrupted from the original. The Elders abandoned this type of crude technology a long, long time ago, I'm having to dig through my memory to figure out how it's supposed to work, and if I can fix it, then I can control it much more easily. Give me some time. Your time, not my superfast time."

  "Hey, Colonel Joe? Are you asleep?" Skippy's voice rang out of the speaker in the ceiling of my sleeping compartment.

  I bolted upright, and whacked my head on a low-hanging cabinet. Before I tried going to sleep in the tiny bed, I figured that cabinet would be a problem, so I hung two pairs of pants over it as padding. Probably saved me from a concussion. Next night, it was time to try sleeping on the floor, the Thuranin beds were too small. "Damn it, Skippy, you made me crack my head." Rubbing my scalp made it worse. Stop rubbing it made it worse too. "What is it," I asked as I stumbled to my feet, ready to run out the door to the bridge. "That Maxohlx cruiser found us?"

  "No! No danger, Joe. Good news, I have good news."

  My zPhone said it was 0134 hours, I'd been asleep for less than three hours and my duty shift on the bridge started in another three and a half hours. "There is no good news at this time of night, Skippy." I settled back in the bed as best I could, alternating between rubbing my head and letting it throb painfully. "Can this wait until morning?"

  "There is no sunrise on a starship, Joe."

  "Oh, for crying out- what is it?" Clearly, he was not going away.

  "Among the data I pulled from that command ship is an interesting analysis of the Kristang asteroid base where we're going. The Thuranin have been monitoring it closely for years, they've mapped the gaps and vulnerabilities of the Kristang defenses."

  "Oh, that is good news. It's going to be easy?"

  "Uh, that would be a no, Joe. This is a tough nut to crack. The Thuranin analysis, and I've confirmed their analysis from the raw data, is that the Kristang have done a very good job of hardening their defenses specifically against the Thuranin. Despite their best efforts at secrecy, the Kristang think it reasonably likely the Thuranin are at least aware there is a research facility in the asteroid, and they have gone to considerable trouble and expense to prevent the Thuranin from swooping in and stealing their goodies."

  "Well, crap." Now he'd ruined my sleep. "It's impossible, then?"

  "No, I didn't say that. The Thuranin can take the asteroid if they really want to, and the Kristang know it. The point of the Kristang defenses is to make it difficult enough for the Thuranin, that the Thuranin will decide raiding the asteroid isn't worth the cost."

  I shook my head in the darkness. "Great alliance the Maxohlx have assembled, everyone has to worry about getting screwed by their allies as much as they worry about the enemy."

  "It is a weakness for them, yes."

  "Bottom line, Skippy," I asked because of his tendency to ramble on, "is raiding this asteroid worth it to us? You made it sound like we don't have much of a choice."

  "You don't have any choice, that I know of. The only reference I can find to an Elder wormhole controller module is at this asteroid. Elder artifacts aren't something you can find on eBay, Joe. We get it from this asteroid base, or you give up on shutting down that wormhole."

  He maddeningly hadn't answered my question. "All right, it's worth it to us. I'll ask this slowly so you'll understand," lack of sleep made me cranky, "can we do it? With this ship, and the people and equipment we have onboard? Wait, wait a minute!" That little shithead was likely to misunderstand anyway. "I'll be more specific; do we have a good chance of success?"

  "Oh, sure, no problemo, Joe! Even better now that I have more data. The Thuranin have been probing the Kristang defenses around the asteroid, partly to evaluate the Kristang's level of technological development, and partly because the Thuranin are hateful little motherfuckers who love to screw with lesser species. With the Thuranin having done the first part of the job for us, I know how to sneak right up to the front gate, so to speak. The Thuranin got very close, their reports indicate blind spots in the Kristang sensor network. Like I said, this is good news."

  "Good news that could have waited until I woke up."

  "Sorry about that, Joe. You can go back to dreamland now."

  "Yeah, like that's going to happen now. Hey, wait a minute." It had been eleven hours since we'd jumped away from the Thuranin battlegroup. "It took your enormous brain all this time to decode the Thuranin data and analyze it? You said you were so fast that us monkeys couldn't even conceive of it."

  "I did have to decrypt over a zettabyte of data," Skippy said defensively, as if I had any idea what a zettabyte was, "from a surprisingly sophisticated encryption scheme, then organize it, decide what to analyze
first. Then analyze a lot of conflicting data to make sense of it."

  "Oh, sorry, Skippy," I didn't mean to insult him, "I'm sure it was a lot of work even for you."

  "Oh, no, it took me only seven minutes. Seemed like forever, though."

  "Seven min- you knew all this a couple minutes after we jumped away?"

  "Yup."

  "Then why the hell did you wake me up in the middle of the freakin' night?"

  "I was bored, Joe. And lonely."

  And that's all he said. His silence made me stifle the angry remark I had ready. Skippy and I had been in almost continuous contact since he'd sprung me from the closet where the Ruhar has been keeping me, before that, he'd had no contact with anyone for a very long time, perhaps millions of years. He'd been able to listen in on other people's conversations after the Kristang first arrived on Paradise, to alleviate some of his boredom, that may have intensified his loneliness; hearing other people interact, and being excluded. Thinking about that reminded me that I was the first person, the first being, that Skippy had talked to since, whatever had happened to him that caused his isolation. With me sleeping, he'd been like a junkie needing a fix. "Sorry about that, Skippy, you do understand that us monkeys need to sleep, right? There are other people aboard, can you talk to them?" Most of the crew was sleeping, Chang and two pilot trainees were on the bridge, and one person was in the sickbay, although anyone pulling a shift in the sickbay could catch a nap while the wounded were sleeping, or sedated or unconscious or whatever Doctor Skippy the mad scientist thought was best for them.

  "They're not comfortable talking with me. Most of them are scared of me."

  "I'll talk to them about that, Skippy. In the morning, Ok? I'm scheduled to be on the bridge again in, like, a little over three hours. Can you do a crossword puzzle or something until then?"