Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  The reason I was aboard this probable suicide mission is that I'd promised Skippy to help him locate the Collective, and so far he'd kept up his end of the deal. Everyone else was aboard out of a sense of duty, or adventure. Foolish, maybe, but entirely honorable. My mother had cried her eyes out when I'd announced that, having just arrived, I was heading back up into space again for an unknown duration. My father had nodded, and shook my hand, and tried to look stoic, because that is the bullshit way men in my family have always been, and I bear-hugged him and we'd both cried. My parents were proud of me, without knowing what I'd done, all they knew is that I landed on the road in front of my parents' house in an alien dropship, and that duty required I go back into space quickly. There were no cheeseburgers on the grill this time, beef wasn't something that had seen the inside of my parents' kitchen recently, but there was chicken on the grill, a chicken raised in my parents' backyard, and it was delicious. My sister had to settle for a phone call with me, she was working in Boston, and she'd wished me luck, and asked if it was true that the Kristang were never going to appear in our skies again. Yes, I assured her, things were back to normal. If anyone could remember what normal had been, before Columbus Day.

  Humanity had a Kristang troopship in orbit, now empty of Kristang and cleared of boobytraps. A troopship that could only be reached by old fashioned chemical rockets, because Skippy had insisted we couldn't leave even a single Kristang or Thuranin dropship behind on the ground as a technological leg up. "Your species went to your moon on your own, Joe, I'm sure they can get into orbit without our help." There were no Kristang left alive in the smoking craters near Hangzhou, Lyon and Durango, and the amount of dust kicked up by the railgun impactors meant humanity would be treated to spectacular sunsets for a couple months.

  I looked down at my iPad, which Skippy had wiped of software and replaced with his own. It displayed status of critical ship systems in a way that made sense to me, however redundant Skippy said that was. It was also filled with all kinds of courses I was expected to take as a US Army officer, and one of the Army lieutenants aboard had been tasked with getting me up to speed, in addition to her regular job. As much as I passionately hated administrative details, I was determined not to be a whiny pain in the ass about it. There were silver eagles on my collar, as long as I wore those eagles, the Army expected me to act like a real colonel. Damn. At my age, I was supposed to be doing stupid things, and hopefully learning from painful experience. There was no time for that now, I had to make up for my own lack of experience by relying on my subordinates. Delegating. I needed to get comfortable with delegating a whole lot. Lt. Colonel Chang was my executive officer, he was in charge of the crew day to day. Major Simms was now back working in her specialty of logistics, she was still frantically stowing away the mountain of supplies that were pile haphazardly in the cargo bays. She felt confident we hadn't forgotten anything vital. Somewhat confident. She'd also, with Chang, drawn up a duty roster for the crew, including assigning people to work in the kitchen that we'd set up in a cargo bay. There were no cooks among the crew, we were all going to take turns cooking and cleaning, including me. On this cruise, there were going to be cheeseburgers. Chang also had a work crew tearing out the tiny Thuranin beds, and replacing them with comfortable human-sized mattresses. For entertainment, Skippy had downloaded the entire internet, and every movie, book and video game ever made.

  With Chang, Simms and others tasked with day to day operations, that left me free to handle important strategic matters, like dealing with Skippy. "Skippy, you confirm we're ready to leave orbit?"

  "Huh? Oh, yeah, sure, whatever." He sounded slightly miffed that our new procedures meant that we humans needed to confirm things on our own, instead of relying on him for everything. "Everything is hunky-dory, Colonel Joe. Warp factor nine on your signal, something like that."

  "Skippy," I said after cutting the intercom to people outside the bridge, and whispering into my microphone so Desai and her copilot and navigator didn't hear, "we talked about this. We cavemen have to fly this ship, after you find the Collective and ditch us for AI paradise, or wherever you're going."

  "No, we didn't talk about it, you talked at me. You weren't listening. Joe, there is almost no chance of you idiots successfully flying this ship back to Earth. If anything, I mean anything, goes wrong with this primitive Thuranin technology, you'll be dead in space with no options. You have no idea how often I'm constantly tweaking systems to keep them running. Your best people don't even understand how the toilets work on the bucket."

  All true. Thuranin toilets didn't use water, and they somehow split waste into individual atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, etc. in a way our that our physicists said was medieval alchemy, not science. The environmental systems didn't just recycle oxygen, they created oxygen molecules out of pure energy, in a way that violated Einstein's famous equation. According to our scientists, the way jumps were plotted used the speed of light as a variable, not an unchanging constant. Skippy responded yes, he could see how it looks that way, and no, he wouldn't help us understand how the universe truly worked, because such knowledge was too dangerous for monkeys. It was small comfort that he told us even the Maxohlx and Rindhalu didn't really understand how the universe worked either.

  "You're missing the point, Skippy. It's not whether we are likely to get home again, it's whether it's possible at all. I've got seventy people aboard this ship who need hope, any hope at all, that they won't automatically die out here when you abandon us."

  "I'm not abandoning you, Joe. I'm, hmmm. Maybe I am abandoning you. I don't want to. As monkeys go, you're reasonably entertaining, you even surprise me sometimes, which ain't easy, I got to tell you. I need to do this, you understand? I need to know who I am, where I came from."

  "I do understand, and I'm a soldier. I made a promise to you when we first met, and I'll keep it. My species is safe again now, thanks to you. Whatever you need, I owe it to you, no matter what it takes. That doesn't mean I self destruct the ship, if I don't absolutely have to." Next to the Big Red Button app on my zPhone, there was now an app labeled Boom. It had two options; one destroyed the ship in thirty seconds, leaving me time to change my mind, the other option destroyed the ship immediately. Destroyed, Skippy assured us, down to the subatomic level, leaving no possible trace the Dutchman had ever been hijacked by lowly humans. We'd be gone, while Skippy could drift in space, pinging like a Thuranin flight recorder beacon. I pitied any ship that picked him up.

  "Got it, and thank you. Confirmed all decks and systems are ready for departure."

  I turned the intercom back on. "Pilot, signal Houston that we're ready for departure, then take us out."

  "Aye aye, Captain." Desai said with satisfaction. "Engaging course, now."

  Several days later, longer than I wanted because we were cutting it close on the wormhole rebooting on its own, and not long enough according to the scientists and engineers both aboard and back home, we stopped near where Skippy intended the wormhole to reopen. Skippy had wanted to zoom out to the wormhole's track as soon as possible, to leave extra time for restarting the wormhole, and he saw no reason to delay. Our technical people wanted the Dutchman to take it slow at first, to rest and retest all critical systems. I was with Skippy on that issue; he was already constantly running diagnostics and controlling the robots that performed maintenance around the ship, and having our human crew double check Skippy's analysis seemed pointless. Our best scientists had no idea how a jump drive worked, same with the reactors, artificial gravity, or pretty much any other Thuranin system. What I agreed to, against the strenuous objections of our scientists, was a 36 hour delay. Mostly, I agreed to 36 hours to give Simms and her logistics team extra time to get all our gear stowed away, and to double check that we hadn't forgotten anything vital, like ketchup. When UNEF, which still technically controlled the mission, urged me to delay another 24 hours, I overruled them and ordered Desai to jump us away. If we delayed another day, and found somet
hing wrong with the ship, it wasn't like Earth could supply spare parts anyway.

  Skippy reactivated the wormhole just as he predicted, and the Dutchman now hung in space, close the weirdly glowing wormhole entrance.

  "Skippy, you need to let us handle this." I insisted.

  "No, I really don't. If you monkeys screw up a wormhole transition in the future, it will be tragic for the ship. If you screw this one up, I won't be able to shut down the wormhole, and that will be tragic for Earth. Put your egos in check, and let me program the insertion course. Come on, Joe, I'm reactivating a wormhole here. There's a lot of variables involved that you'll never need to deal with again."

  Desai turned to look back at me. We were about to enter the wormhole near Earth that had been shut down, a wormhole Skippy had recently rebooted. The displays showed that in front of the Dutchman was a glowing pool of flickering light, in the corner of the display was a clock, counting down until the wormhole shifted to its next point. One minute, thirty two seconds and counting. "Captain, I think we should let Skippy program the course this time, I don't mind watching again."

  I bit my lip while I considered. "Skippy, how do we know there isn't an armada of Thuranin ships on the other side, anxious to see why this one wormhole suddenly shut down?"

  "Unlikely. But if you're worried about it, I reprogrammed the wormhole controller, this wormhole now has an entirely new set of emergence points. If there's an armada waiting at one of the old emergence points, they'll be waiting for a very long time. Like, forever."

  I resisted the temptation to say that is something he should mentioned before we left Earth. "Great. Super. Program a course through the wormhole for us."

  "Done."

  "Pilot," I paused. This was it. Most likely the last time I'd ever be within a hundred lightyears of Earth. All the cheeseburgers in the universe couldn't make up for that. "Take us through."

  "Aye aye. Engaging autopilot now."

  The transition through the wormhole was the nonevent it always was. One moment we were on one side, then next moment we were a hundred or more lightyears away. "Transition complete," Desai reported, "and, we're right where Skippy said we would be. If these displays are accurate."

  "They are," Skippy said cheerily. "Everything's fine, Joe, no problems with the ship."

  "Do your thing, Skippy." I ordered, with just a tiny bit of apprehension. If Skippy double-crossed us now, there wasn't anything I could do about it.

  "Confirmed." The display screen showed that, behind us, the wormhole's pool of light blinked out, seventeen seconds early. "Wormhole deactivated."

  "It won't reset, reboot, nothing like that?" The display, which had shown the wormhole as a brightly glowing symbol, was now blank. In deep interstellar space, there wasn't anything other than the Dutchman within a lightyear.

  "No, never. The wormhole generator has been shut down, disconnected from its power source. Like I told you, if you decide to use your magic bean, you need to give it thirty eight hours to come back online. Forty two hours, to be safe."

  The magic bean Skippy referred to was the Elder wormhole controller module in the cargo hold, connected to my zPhone, that could bring the wormhole back online for a one-time use. For us to get home, without Skippy. A magic beanstalk that led home. I'd insisted on having it, Skippy relented reluctantly after a long argument. Again, it wasn't about us actually getting home, it was about the possibility. Hope. "Thank you. Excellent. Where to next?"

  Skippy answered. "How about that blue star over there?"

  Desai waved her finger at several blue stars in the display. "There are a lot of blue stars. Which one?'

  Skippy chuckled, with a soft blue glow. "Does it matter?"

  THE END