Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “Yes, it was Sergeant Adams. You’re tired, so I told her that you’re in the shower and she should call back later. Because that hardon isn’t going to take care of itself.”

  “You told her what?”

  “Well it’s true, Joe. That thing is annoyingly persistent until you do something to make it go away. Hey, Sergeant Adams is a girl, you should ask her to help-”

  “Sergeant Adams,” I hurriedly said into my zPhone, “you called me?”

  “Yes, sir, but Skippy told me you were, busy?” There was a slight, amused hesitation between her saying ‘were’ and ‘busy’.

  Damn it. “I was trying to catch some extra rack time, Sergeant. Ignore the beer can.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said with a laugh.

  “I wasn’t, oh, forget it. What is it, Adams?”

  “Truthfully, sir, now I forgot why I called you.”

  Sometimes I really, really hate my life.

  And a certain hateful beer can.

  After my four-hour duty shift in the command chair, I called Sarah back into my office. She looked like she had slept great; all bright eyed and cheery. I sipped my third cup of coffee that morning and silently hated her.

  “What we need next is a starship,” she announced with the annoyingly bubbly enthusiasm of people who had gotten a decent amount of sleep. “A ship, or ships, that will conduct the mock attack on the Ruhar negotiation team.”

  “Great,” I said with a face that indicated I did not think it was great at all. “So, how do we get a ship?”

  “How does anyone get a ship?” She asked herself, staring at the ceiling. Without looking at me, she ticked off ideas on her fingers. “One, you make a ship. Two, you buy a ship. And three, you can steal a ship.” She dropped her gaze to look at me. “I think that’s all?”

  “Make, buy or steal?” I asked, trying to think of how I would go about getting a car on Earth. “I suppose another option is to rent, or borrow a ship, but that doesn’t apply in this case. Skippy,” I automatically looked at the speaker in the ceiling. “Can I assume option One is not a possibility?”

  “Duh!” His avatar popped into existence. “Double duh, Joe. Make a ship? If I could create a starship, I would have suggested that.”

  “I figured that. Option two then, no way we could buy a ship out here?”

  “Not without revealing that we are a flea-bitten ship of pirate monkeys, no.”

  “We couldn’t do it anonymously through Paypal or something?”

  “Joe, I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were joking. The answer is no.”

  “That leaves stealing a ship,” Sarah said unhappily. “I’m afraid that type of operation is outside my area of expertise, Colonel. You’re the pirate,” she added with a smile.

  “Aaargh, shiver me timbers,” I played along with a grin. “Wait, wait,” I waved a hand to give me time to finish my thought. Damn, Skippy is right, most of the time my freakin’ brain is painfully slow. “Option One. Make a ship. What if we change one letter in there?”

  Sarah’s expression was puzzled, then mildly disturbed.

  And I realized the woman sitting in my office though I meant ‘m-a-T-e’ mate. “Fake!” I exclaimed. “We could Fake a ship, rather than Make a ship. Skippy?”

  “I’m here. I heard you, but I have no idea what you’re thinking of. Fake a starship?”

  “Yeah,” I plunged forward with enthusiasm. “Do we really need a starship to attack the Ruhar? Or do we just need to make the Ruhar think someone attacked them?”

  “Uh, like, I hack into the computer system of the Ruhar’s ship, and make their sensors show there are missiles flying at them?”

  “No,” I shook my head. “I figure you would have to get too close in order to hack into their computer-”

  “You got that right,” Skippy scoffed. “When we left Paradise the first time, I was able to fool sensors on all ships in the area, because I had months to infiltrate the combat information network both sides. That kind of thing takes time, Joe. Besides, hacking into just one ship wouldn’t do any good, I would need to hack into every ship on both sides.”

  “Uh huh, I agree. And hacking sensors wouldn’t be enough; the Ruhar would need to feel their ship’s shields getting maser impacts. No sensor data could provide that sensation. No, my question is whether we really need a ship. Could we use a microwormhole to create the gamma ray burst of ships jumping in? And then use a microwormhole to project a sensor image of a ship, and to shoot maser beams through?”

  Sarah must have liked that idea, because her whole expression lit up. “We hit the Ruhar, but there are no actual ships involved?”

  “Yup,” I grinned, pleased with myself for thinking up a genius idea.

  “Hey, I hate to spoil the party, pal, but no can do,” Skippy said with disgust. “That would take a cluster of microwormholes for each fake ship, operating in close proximity. One wormhole to project the initial gamma ray burst, after which that wormhole would collapse. Another wormhole to shoot each maser beam through, and after each shot, that wormhole would collapse and create another, very suspicious gamma ray burst. And one wormhole to project the image of a ship, using sort of a reverse stealth field. The problem, Joe, is there is no way for wormholes, even microwormholes, to operate that closely to each other. Their event horizons, which I am not going to punish myself by explaining to you, would set up a resonance that would tear all the wormholes apart, and create a temporary and very dangerous rift in local spacetime. Beyond local spacetime, actually, something else I am not going to attempt explaining. And, you dumdum, if there is no actual ship, there will be no debris left behind when the ship self-destructs. Duh!”

  “Crap. You’re right, that is a ‘duh’.”

  “Ha ha!” Skippy laughed gleefully. “See, Joe? This is what happens when brainless apes try to think. Your species should stick with eating bananas.”

  “Thank you for the encouragement, Skippy, we truly appreciate it.”

  “It’s the least I can do, Joe.”

  “It’s not-”

  “Believe me, if I could do less, I would.”

  “Dr. Rose, it looks like we’re going to need to steal a starship,” I said with a frown.

  “Colonel,” she stood up, “when your Merry Band of Pirates has a plan to do that, I can look at it from a covert ops point of view. Stealing alien starships is not something they covered at Langley.”

  Crap. I wondered if that topic was covered in any of the hundred US Army officer training PowerPoint presentations I had not read yet.

  I pulled the senior leadership together again and gave them an update. No one had thought up a plan better than Dr. Rose’s idea to fake an attack on the Ruhar negotiation team. Major Smythe was particularly enthusiastic. “I like it. Instead of trying to stop the Ruhar from sending a ship to Earth, we prevent them wanting to send a ship at all.”

  I grinned. “It has the advantage of being devious and simple.”

  “Simple,” Smythe observed, “except for the part about us needing to steal a starship.”

  “More than one starship,” Skippy cautioned us. “If we are going to conduct an attack the Ruhar would consider a credible threat, we probably need more than one ship. Kristang starships, of course.”

  Smythe’s faint grin faded away as he contemplated the notion of stealing multiple enemy starships. “Do we know type of ships?”

  Crap. I should have discussed that with Skippy. “Skippy? We talked about needing to conduct the attack in a manner that a rival clan would; what types of ships would they use?”

  “Nothing big, Joe,” he answered immediately, and did not even call me a dumdum for not having asked that question before. “Many clans would like to disrupt those negotiations, but no clan wants to be blamed for starting a civil war. So a clan hitting the Ruhar negotiators would want to remain concealed. They would most likely use warships no larger than a frigate; because frigates are plentiful and expendable. Any warship
larger than a frigate would be considered too valuable to commit to a suicide attack. Also, the Kristang fleet simply does not have a huge number of ships larger than frigates, so if one or two go missing, it will be noticed.” Skippy had told us the Kristang philosophy of warship design lead to their ‘destroyers’ being as heavily armed and protected as a Ruhar light cruiser, or even some regular cruisers. The Kristang liked to have a fewer number of powerful ships that could hit hard, while the Ruhar supplemented their capital ships with a large fleet of ships that were cheaper to build and maintain. It was impossible to say which philosophy was better; the technological superiority of the Ruhar gave them a slight advantage in single-ship combat.

  “Frigates, huh? We did capture a Kristang frigate on our first mission,” I remembered with a frown. “And we lost a lot of people in the boarding action.” Our desperate assault had been very close to failure; a Kristang almost blew up the ship to prevent us from taking it. “All right, let’s start there. We need to steal two Kristang frigates. That is not going to be easy.”

  “What about a Q-ship, Colonel?” Smythe asked.

  “An armed transport ship?” I asked skeptically. “Skippy, is that an option?”

  “Absolutely,” he agreed. “There are plenty of obsolete transport ships a clan could arm and throw into a suicide mission. A transport would need to be fitted with stronger shield generators, and missile tubes, but that would not be difficult for the Kristang.”

  “Stealing a transport ship would be easier than taking over a frigate, right?” I asked happily, thinking we were finally making progress.

  “The answer to that is ‘No’, Joe,” Skippy took delight in crushing my happiness. “Transport ships typically travel in convoys escorted by multiple frigates, or a destroyer and several frigates for high-value transports. You can forget about this being easy.”

  During a break, I was in the galley getting coffee, when Skippy called on my zPhone. “Joe, I have completed temporary repairs to the jump drive; we should move away, in case the Thuranin detect the remnants of the jump wormhole we left near the relay station.”

  “You still think they probably won’t be able to do that?” I asked fearfully. With the jump drive offline, I was terrified of suddenly being surrounded by a Thuranin battlegroup. Even now, my hands were in my lap because I didn’t want anyone to see them trembling. Skippy had assured me he could bring the drive back online for an emergency jump within minutes, probably. He wasn’t confident how successful a jump attempt would be, until he had time to fully analyze the drive components and get them working together again.

  “I still think the Thuranin are unlikely to follow us successfully, yes. Ironically, the damage to our jump drive left a remnant signature that is more effectively scrambled than if we had dropped off a quantum resonator behind us. Unfortunately, it very nearly scrambled this ship. Joe,” he lowered his voice, “we got lucky with that last jump, and by ‘luck’ I mean the way you cavemen think of luck. Halfway through the jump cycle, I detected a problem and I tried to abort the jump, but it was too late. It was, as you humans say, a nail-biter. Probably best you not tell anyone about that.”

  “Crap. I wish you hadn’t told me about it.”

  “Hey, we’re alive. In this branch of spacetime, anyway,” he added cheerily.

  “What do you mean, in this bran-”

  “You shouldn’t wrack your tiny brain about that, Joe,” he hastened to say. “Anywho, while you are trying to think up a way to save your species from the latest mess you’ve gotten yourselves into, we should take a detour. The ship needs downtime for maintenance, and since we don’t know what’s ahead of us, it would be good to top off the fuel tanks while we can. There is a boring, uninhabited system centered on a dull red dwarf star within three jumps from here. According to star charts of all available species, no ship has ever been there.”

  “Never?” I asked skeptically.

  “Never, Joe. This star system is like New Jersey between exits on the Turnpike; nobody ever goes there.”

  “I guess if you need to work on the ship, we might as well be in a star system, if it’s safe. But you told us the relay station was a safe place to be, remember?”

  “That was different!” He protested in a hurt tone. “I told you no ship was scheduled to visit the relay station, that didn’t mean there are never any surprise visitors. Relay stations are supposed to have ships visiting, you dumdum. The star system where I want to go now never has any visitors, because it is so incredibly ordinary and boring. If you have trouble persuading Chotek, tell him we need to go to some type of star system anyway, and I think this one represents the lowest risk within our current jump range.”

  “Ok, I’ll ask him. He is not in the best mood right now.”

  Chotek was not in a good mood, and he argued with me and then Skippy about why it was necessary to take the risk of going to a star system. It took Skippy fifteen minutes, and every ounce of patience he had within his beer can, to persuade Count Chocula to make the obvious decision.

  “Sir,” I said with embarrassment. “Until we have a viable plan for preventing the Ruhar from sending a ship to Earth, we should concentrate on making this ship as combat capable as it can be. Traveling to a star system will not delay planning.”

  Chotek couldn’t think of a good reason not to go, so we set course for the red dwarf star.

  Thursday nights aboard the Flying Dutchman are movie night. This was not the type of mandofun where everyone has to show up and enjoy it whether you want to or not. I had enough of that crap before I was an officer. People could show up or not; attendance was sparse at first. After the first month almost the entire off-duty crew was enthusiastically crowded in there for movie night. Each of our five nationalities got to pick a movie in rotation, so we watched a Chinese movie, then French, then Indian, British and American. None of the movies needed to be dubbed, because we listened through our zPhone earpieces, and Skippy translated for us. With Skippy’s awesome awesomeness, the sound was very close to being in sync with the actor’s mouth moving. The only problem was when Skippy decided parts of a film were boring and inserted his own dialog. The first time he did that, it was during a Chinese action movie, I forget which one. Anyway, some Chinese Army officer is fighting some big threat to China, or Earth or civilization; truthfully I wasn’t paying attention because Skippy’s translation was so freakin’ hilarious. In one scene, the officer hurries into some command center and is urging the brass to fight back or launch an attack or something, but in Skippy’s translation the guy bursts into the command center, all beat up and dirty with his uniform ripped. He says “I am sorry, the toilet exploded. My mother is a chicken. Also, I am not wearing any pants.”

  The Chinese team no doubt wondered why everyone else was rolling on the floor laughing during the most dramatic scene of the film. Then they got pissed about it. Then they were jealous that we were all enjoying the movie way more than they were. Watching Skippy’s version of movies got to be more popular than the originals.

  It was cool watching movies from China, India and France; there were a lot of good and interesting movies I had never even heard of. When it was the American team’s turn to show a movie, at first we picked old comedies like Independence Day, Battle: Los Angeles, War of the Worlds, etc.

  Oh, you don’t think those films are comedies? To the Merry Band of Pirates, any of those plucky-band-of-humans-defeat-alien-invasion-using-guts-and-rifles movies are freakin’ hilarious Hollywood bullshit. When the Flying Dutchman arrived, the Kristang had two ships in Earth orbit, just two, and one of those was a lightly-armed troop transport. With those two ships at untouchable altitude in low orbit, they totally dominated our home planet. A single Kristang frigate could wipe out any target on Earth with maser cannons and railguns, or missiles if it was a high-value target worth expending munitions on. Our high-speed Special Operations soldiers on the ground had not been able to do a single useful thing against the Kristang, and they knew it. The situat
ion had almost been worse for hotshot pilots; they flew the best aircraft their country had, and those fighter jets were no more than laughable toys to the Kristang, good only for target practice. Using only a single frigate and bioweapons, the Kristang could have completely wiped out human life on Earth, without us being able to fire one single freakin’ shot at them. Orbit is the ultimate high ground. Starfaring species like the Kristang have it. Humanity does not.

  Anyway, movie night was fun. And culturally educational. Did you know that Chinese eat salted strips of dried squid instead of popcorn? Me neither.

  And, I won’t mention some of the stuff the French team ate.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  "Greetings, Colonel Joe Bishop," Skippy's voice said while I was in my office, distracted by some report I was supposed to be reading. It was about the repairs Skippy planned to conduct once we reached the gas giant planet. Our pirate ship was in worse condition than I had realized; it was wearing out from a lack of spare parts, and the bad jump we had made escaping from the exploding cruiser had caused significant damage. Unless Skippy and his bots could effect repairs, the Flying Dutchman would not be fit for a mission to save Earth. Again.

  "Uh huh, greetings, Skippy the Magnificent," I replied distractedly, eyes focused on my tablet. "What's up?"

  "Mmm hmm," he made a sound like clearing his throat.

  "Just a minute." I didn't want to read the report, but if I lost my train of thought right then, I would need to go all the way back to the beginning of the stupid thing. Then, something different about Skippy's voice caught my attention. It wasn't coming out of my tablet, or the speaker in the ceiling. It seemed to be coming from-