Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “You are filling me with confidence, Skippy.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, the crew would be incinerated instantly before they got crushed. They should be wearing Kristang spacesuits as a precaution against minor problems. Kristang armored suits are made of tough material, as you know from your first space dive, however, in the event of a serious hull breach, it is possible those suits would not compensate quickly enough.”

  “That does not make me feel any better. It makes me feel worse, because I’ll be staying aboard the ship, and ordering other people to take the risk.” I was not qualified to fly the larger type of Thuranin dropship, and I wasn’t the best pilot for the job anyway. I was probably the least-skilled pilot aboard our pirate ship. “We absolutely must have pilots aboard the dropships? You can’t control the dropships remotely?”

  “Not with a pair of dropships flying in formation, Joe. The latency issue caused by signal lag would make it impossible to control the dropships together. I would have to go aboard one of the dropships-”

  “No! No, that is not an option,” I declared. No way was I going to risk UNEF’s greatest asset in a risky mission. If the dropship he was in suffered a failure, Skippy would helplessly plummet to the core of the gas giant planet, and effectively be lost to us forever. “Our pilots will fly the mission.”

  “We will arrive in the proper orbit shortly, Joe. If you have serious second thoughts, you should have expressed them before I went through all the trouble of building this very complicated fuel-collection scoop apparatus,” Skippy said, sounding peeved. “And before the pilots wasted time practicing this mission in the simulator.”

  I was not concerned about pilots wasting their time; it kept them happy and busy, and that type of training might be useful in the future. My problem was guilt; I would be ordering pilots to take dropships into action they were not designed for, using an untested fuel-collection ‘gizmo’. The guilt was not that the pilots would be taking a risk; they were Ok with that. No, my guilt was that we had time to dawdle in an uninhabited star system at all. If I or the command staff had been able to think up a good, workable plan to prevent the Ruhar from sending a ship to Earth, we would be implementing that plan rather than taking time to top off our fuel tanks. That meant if anyone was killed or injured while taking part in Skippy’s Flying Circus, it would be partly my fault.

  And if we didn’t think up a plan to stop the Ruhar from reaching Earth, the extinction of my entire species might be partly my fault. Or entirely my fault, damn it. Crap, I needed to focus on what was most important. “Skippy, I know nothing about the technical details of refueling, so I have to trust you on this one.”

  “Joey, Joey, Joey. You trust your life to me with a million things every freakin’ minute. You don’t keep the reactors from exploding. I got this. Now, go, I don’t know, try to do something useful. Are we Ok to proceed or not?”

  “Yes. I’ll tell the duty officer,” I said with a final skeptical knock on Skippy’s cobbled-together fuel collection device. “I don’t suppose there is any point in asking Nagatha for a second opinion?”

  “Oof,” Skippy breathed a sigh of exasperation. “I told you, it, she, is a submind built for communications, nor for any type of analysis or control. And if you asked her for a second opinion, she would tell you-

  “I would tell Colonel Bishop that he has no choice but to trust you,” Nagatha interrupted.

  “Thank you,” Skippy said smugly.

  “He has no choice,” she scolded, “because you don’t tell him anything useful. Colonel, in this case, Skippy’s analysis is correct, the refueling operation should proceed successfully. That is based on my verification of Skippy’s analysis. Of course, if Skippy forgot to include something in his analysis, I would not know about it. I am, as Skippy reminded you, designed for communications and not crunching numbers.”

  “Thank you anyway, Nagatha. See, Skippy, you could try being nice sometimes.”

  “Ugh. I’d rather jump the ship into a black hole. Damn, I regret the day I loaded that submind into the relay station’s computer.”

  Hans Chotek scrunched up his nose, closed his eyes tightly, and held his breath to suppress a sneeze inside the helmet of his spacesuit. He had sneezed before in training, the experience gave him confidence that a sneeze would not be disastrous as he first thought, it was still embarrassing. The inner surface of the helmet’s visor was protected by some type of energy field, specifically to protect the visor from contamination that might obscure visibility. Even the moisture he exhaled with every breath had the potential to fog the visor and render it useless, if not for the amazing technology built into the helmet. If he did sneeze, the droplets would be caught by the force field, then drawn gently downward into a collection tray at the bottom of the visor; from there any foreign material was vacuumed into a holding tank near his left shoulder. Due to some magic Chotek did not remember from suit training, the tank never needed to be emptied or cleaned during a mission; the material was stripped down to its constituent elements and the useful parts like oxygen recycled. Chotek knew that Skippy’s bots performed almost all of the maintenance tasks on the suits, so whatever service the holding tank required, it wasn’t something humans took care of.

  The urge to sneeze passed, and Chotek opened his eyes. He was not in a good place to be standing with eyes closed for an extended time; if he lost his balance he might fall and tumble head over heels for a long way. The suit’s stabilizers should protect him from clumsily falling forward and Chotek had tested that function in training. He did not wish to trust his life to a mysterious, unseen technology that he did not understand.

  Opening his eyes reminded him of where he was standing; at the lip of a vast crater that had been carved out of the moon millions of years ago. Literally carved, according to Skippy. The damage to the moon had not been caused by an explosion, instead a partial sphere of material extending deep into the moon had been scooped out and deposited in orbit around the gas giant. That material, free from the gravity of its host moon, had quickly broken up and now formed a partial ring around the planet. The relocation of such a large mass disrupted not only the host moon, but the orbits of all the moons circling the gas giant.

  Chotek looked down in awe. The crater was so large that the far rim could only be recognized using the visor’s handy magnification feature. Originally, when the crater was created, it was a perfect partial sphere. Quickly, material welling up from the moon’s core had flowed in to fill the bottom of the void, and subsequent quakes and meteor impacts had covered the remaining surface with cracks and small craters. Being newer and consisting of material different from the moon’s ancient surface, the crater was distinctly darker, making it appear even deeper when viewed from the lip.

  “How are you doing, Sir?” Major Smythe called.

  Chotek paused to take a breath. “Fine, Major. I’m standing on a moon in a star system thousands of lightyears from Earth, at the edge of a crater made by a force that could destroy our home planet, and the only thing keeping me alive is a spacesuit that is maintained by a shiny beer can.”

  “An alien spacesuit, Sir,” Smythe reminded the mission leader. “A powered armor mech suit made by a species we are now fighting against. The science team tells me they do not understand half the technology in these suits. Regardless, they work splendidly. Without them, we would not be able to enjoy this view.”

  Chotek grunted. “I had expected this view to fill me with awe, but instead, I find myself depressed.”

  “Depressed?” Smythe could understand experiencing a wide variety of emotions while standing at the edge of an ancient cataclysm. Depression was not within that range.

  “Yes. The technology that was used here, to scoop out such an enormous part of this moon, is awe-inspiring. And that is the problem. To the beings who caused this, the technology they used was well understood, maybe even taken for granted by them. That depresses me. Major, the beings who did this,” he swept an arm to encom
pass the vast crater, “are so far beyond our comprehension, their technology might as well be magic to us. Even if we are able to complete our current mission to prevent a Ruhar ship from traveling to Earth, we- Even if by some miracle we are able to deal with all the known threats in this galaxy, there is some force out there we don’t yet know about. Beings who could create a crater like this are a threat even to the Maxolhx and Rindhalu. How could we protect ourselves against such a threat?” He shook his head inside the helmet, forgetting that Smythe standing beside him could not see the gesture.

  “I get your meaning, Sir,” Smythe replied quietly, keeping the slight annoyance he was feeling out of his voice. He had come down to the Dead Star to get away from the ship for a while, for a change of scenery rather than the same passageway walls and bulkheads. He had come down for an opportunity to engage in surface combat training with his team. He had accompanied Chotek on a walk out to the rim of the crater, partly to get some private time with their mission commander, but mostly simply to stand in awe of a force beyond his comprehension. And now Hans Chotek had dragged Smythe’s mind back to threat analysis. Was an hour of peace too much to ask for?

  Chotek took a moment to suppress another sneeze. Had dust from the moon’s surface gotten past the airlock filters of the portable shelters they were living in? That was unlikely; when Chotek had put on the helmet inside the shelter, it was sparklingly pristine. He had seen, touched and smelled moon dust in the science lab section of one shelter; it had a slightly burnt ozone smell that was not inside his helmet. The urge to sneeze passed again. Looking out through his helmet visor reminded him of how badly he wanted to stand on an alien world without a spacesuit and breathe unfiltered air. When Colonel Bishop went down to the surface of Paradise, twice, Chotek should have accompanied the team at least once. The first time, he had not dared leave the ship in case something went wrong. The second time, it had partly been his own arrogant stubbornness that kept him aboard the Flying Dutchman. He deeply regretted that now. Turning to his right, he looked into Smythe’s visor. How many worlds had Smythe set foot on? Even counting only the planets, the British Special Air Services Major had walked on Newark, Paradise and Jumbo. Although, Jumbo’s atmosphere had not been breathable, so the away team had been forced to live in their suits. “Major, what was it like on Newark?”

  “Most of the time, it was like being in Scotland during the springtime, except summer was never coming. Not on that world.” Sensing Chotek wanted to talk, Smythe told of his experience on Newark; not details of the successful military operation, but what it was like simply being there. To stand on an alien world wearing nothing but cold weather gear, to breathe the damp chilly air, to feel as if you could never get enough oxygen. When Chotek asked what it was like to stand in the chamber where the last sentient natives of Newark had spent their last days huddled against killing cold, Smythe told him. “As you said, there is an unknown force out there, Sir. Here, it scooped out this crater. On Newark, it pushed an entire habitable planet out of its orbit. It wiped out an entire sentient species. The people there, the natives, they knew what had happened to them. They didn’t know why, or how, or who, but they knew their world was going to turn into a block of ice, and there was nothing they could do about it. No way they could survive.” He turned to look in Chotek’s visor. “Since Newark, I’ve asked myself if humanity could survive if something like that happened to Earth. The inhabitants of Newark had Bronze-age technology. We have nuclear reactors. Could we have survived deep in caves, or down deep in the oceans where the water didn’t freeze?” Smythe looked at the crater. “I don’t know. The beings who made this crater, I don’t think they would leave anything to chance. If humanity tried to survive an event like Newark, I have a feeling we would be hit with an even worse disaster. What bothers me, Sir, is like you said; even if we deal with all the known threats, something like this is looming over our heads.”

  “Much as I hate to admit it,” Chotek replied slowly, “I am beginning to agree with Colonel Bishop; we may need to investigate what happened to Newark, and here and other sites you found on the Dutchman’s second mission.”

  “There is a larger threat out there,” Smythe agreed.

  “What bothers me right now is the nature of that threat. We think it is a mystery because Skippy tells us it is a mystery to him. Newark was pushed out of orbit, and this crater was made, after the Elders left the galaxy, and before the Rindhalu developed capability for interstellar travel. That is only what Skippy tells us, and it is only what Skippy knows. Skippy admits his memories are incomplete and garbled. Major Smythe, how much do you trust Skippy?”

  Smythe took a moment to consider his answer. “Originally, I trusted Skippy only where his interests aligned with ours. On my first mission with him, he wanted to find this Collective, whatever that is. Everything we did during the first half of that mission was for Skippy’s benefit. Even going down to Newark and our actions there were to further Skippy’s goals; he needed a place the crew could live while he repaired the ship, and he wanted us to take the comm node and AI from the Kristang scavenger group on Newark. Then something changed, and I don’t know all the details, you would have to ask Colonel Bishop. The second half of that mission was all about stopping the Thuranin surveyor ship from traveling to Earth. Skippy helped us with that aspect of the mission, he did most of the work. Stopping that surveyor ship did not directly benefit Skippy. Preventing the Ruhar from sending a ship to Earth now also does not directly benefit him. Our recent actions to safeguard the future of UNEF on Paradise had no benefit to him that I can think of. He helped us anyway, he is continuing to help us. Part of why he helps us might be his friendship with Bishop,” Smythe shrugged. “I find it difficult to believe a being like Skippy considers friendship with a monkey,” one side of his mouth turned up in a wry smile, “to be as valuable as we think of friendships. We are not his peers, we never will be. Eventually, Skippy will insist on contacting the Collective. He has said before he does that, he needs answers for what happened in the galaxy while he was dormant. If we want to investigate the nature of the threat we’re facing, then our goals align with Skippy’s.”

  Hans Chotek took one last look down into the crater, and shivered despite the cozy warmth of the suit.

  Desai wriggled in her somewhat ill-fitting Kristang powered armor suit, trying to get comfortable. She was not our shortest crew member, but she wasn’t tall either, and the Kristang suits could be modified only so much. While Desai normally did not wear a suit, she had trained to wear one when she was flying a dropship, so she had a suit custom made for her. She still didn’t like it, and I didn’t blame her. I had worn a suit almost full-time during the mission to the heavy gravity planet Jumbo, and it got irritating after a while. The warrior ethos of the Kristang prevented them from making many concessions to the suit user’s comfort; likely the lizards thought things like ergonomics and comfort were signs of weakness unbecoming a warrior.

  “Are you comfy in there?” I asked, holding a helmet for her. We were outside her dropship in a docking bay, running a preflight check, although Skippy of course assured us everything was perfect with both dropships.

  “Comfort is not the issue, Colonel,” she replied as she shown a light into a thruster. Dropping her voice, she turned to me. “This is going to be difficult flying. I appreciate your faith in me, but as I have told you before, I am not the best pilot aboard the Dutchman. Someone else would be a better candidate to fly this fuel-collection run.”

  “Desai,” I checked another thruster for her, and gave her a thumb’s up gesture. “I know you are not our most technically skilled pilot. That is why I want you flying lead on the first mission.”

  “Sir?”

  “Our best pilots know they are hotshots, and they might fly like it. I do not need any hotshot cowboy crap going on while you are flying in atmosphere that could crush these dropships. If it gets too dangerous down there, I expect you to abort the mission. We’ll debrief, make adjustmen
ts, and try it again. The last thing we need is someone’s ego making them push too hard.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she said, this time with a little smile.

  “Desai, you are an excellent pilot; and I know for damned sure you are cool under pressure. What I value most about you is your judgment. If all I wanted was a great stick jockey, I could have chosen any pilot. I want these dropships to come back; that means you fly lead.”

  “I might scuff the paint a bit, Sir,” she laughed.

  “Don’t worry, it’ll buff right out,” I winked. “You come back safely, with or without fuel, understood?” I offered her a fist, and she bumped me.

  “Got it.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Two of our big Thuranin dropships we called ‘Condors’ were away on their refueling mission, and I had nothing to do other than monitor their progress, drive the CIC crew crazy and worry myself sick. I went to the galley to get coffee, more because I needed something to do than because I needed a jolt of caffeine right then. Adams was sitting at a table, reading something on a tablet, so I took the opportunity to sit down across from her. “Sergeant, I want to show you something,” I set my tablet on the table. “Hey, Skippy. You made our unit patches,” I meant the pirate-paramecium logo for the Merry Band of Pirates.

  “Yes, and I did a spectacular job on that, if I do say so myself.”

  “You always do say so yourself,” I rolled my eyes. “Anyway, thanks for that. Two of our navy pilots-”

  “They are called ‘Naval Aviators’, Joe.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too, but Nagatha told me I should be more respectful by using the correct terms. ‘Pilot’ is an Air Force term.”

  “Army too. We have pilots. Anyway, these aviators mentioned to me that we need a logo for the ship. So, I sketched this,” I pulled up the image on my iPad and turned the display toward Adams. “What do you think?”