Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “Great. Thank you for your awesomeness.” The first of Skippy’s ‘complications’ was going through the wormhole, without being detected by the Thuranin. That was successfully accomplished.

  The next ‘complication’ was the extensive Thuranin sensor network around this wormhole emergence point. According to Skippy, we had passed the first hurdle: the network accepted the fake ID code provided by Skippy. That code, he warned, would not pass close scrutiny by Thuranin command. Before we could park the ship near the Kristang transports to work on them, he needed to worm his way into the sensor network and take partial control. “How long will it take for you to get into the sensor network, Skippy?” Before we went through the wormhole, Skippy had only been able to guess how long it would take him to hack in; too many unknown variables, he said.

  “Doing it now,” he said in that distracted voice that I hated. “This could take a while, even in meatsack caveman time, Joe. The network is widely distributed; the problem is the far nodes of the network are responding at the painfully slow speed of light. We’re good for now, I’m doing some unauthorized things with the laws of physics that you don’t need to know about.”

  “We’re good?”

  “Yes. By the time we reach the Kristang ships, I will have full control of the sensor network. If a Thuranin ship arrives before then, we will have to jump away whether I’m in control of the network or not.”

  “Fair enough. Colonel Chang, our payload is still secure?”

  “Confirmed. We had some flaking off the surfaces, nothing significant.” He referred to the three asteroids we carried on the Dutchman’s remaining hardpoint docking platforms. Yes, one of Skippy’s delightful surprises was that along the way, we had to stop in a crappy, uninhabited star system to pick up a trio of asteroids. And not just any three random asteroids, oh, no. That would be way too easy. Instead, we poked around the boring star system what seemed like forever while Skippy scanned for just the right three asteroids, like he was Goldi-freakin’-locks and the bears weren’t coming home any time soon. The asteroids could not be too big, or too small. They could not be made of rock too soft or metal too dense. I swear, waiting for Skippy to select three asteroids was like waiting while a girlfriend tries on shoes. In my experience, she looks at and tries a hundred pairs of shoes, and it takes hours while you slowly lose your will to live, and in the end she leaves the store with either nothing, or a pair of shoes exactly like the ones she was already wearing.

  Not that I’m still bitter about it.

  Securing those bulky, inert chunks of rock to the Dutchman’s three docking platforms had been an enormous pain in the ass. To make room for the rocks, we had to leave Nagatha and the relay station/lifeboat behind. If the operation went according to plan, we would pick up Nagatha either on our way back, or after the mock attack on the Ruhar negotiating team. If we took all three Kristang transports, we wouldn’t have room for Nagatha until we dropped one of the transports.

  When Skippy proposed that we bring a trio of asteroids with us, I couldn’t believe it. The rocks were not to help us take the transports, they were necessary to maintain our cover after the mock attack on the Ruhar. After the attack, we did not want anyone poking around, trying to figure out where our Q-ships came from. Skippy’s hacking into the Thuranin sensor network would mostly cover our tracks. He could erase any evidence of us having come through the wormhole at a time when the wormhole was not scheduled to be open. He could wipe records showing data about a strange-looking Thuranin star carrier that wasn’t listed in their fleet database. And he could prevent the Thuranin from seeing us taking aboard the Kristang transports and jumping away with them. With the awesome awesomeness of Skippy, the Thuranin would never know the Flying Dutchman was ever there.

  What Skippy could not do was permanently change the laws of physics. After we left, the changes he had made to the programming of the sensor network satellites would gradually be overwritten as the code was updated by passing ships. After the network was restored to full functioning, it would still be unable to report that the Flying Dutchman had been there, because Skippy would have erased that data. But the sensors would be able to report that the mass of one or more Kristang transports in the area was suddenly missing. And that would start the Thuranin asking uncomfortable questions about why those stranded hulks of ships had been taken, by who, and where they had gone. It would not take the Thuranin long to realize the missing ships were involved in the attack on the Ruhar negotiators.

  Which would not be good for us, or humanity.

  To avoid that, we needed to prevent the Thuranin from ever discovering the hulks of those ships had gone anywhere. We needed to leave a mass equal to the mass of each ship, we needed to remove the navigation beacons from the ships and attach them to the asteroids. And we needed to shroud the asteroids. Yes, we had to cover the asteroids in an inflatable sort of balloon. Skippy assured us the Thuranin were not paying close attention to those worthless ships; but if those distant objects suddenly became more, or less, large or shiny than they used to be, that would attract attention. Thus, the need to surround the asteroids in a balloon that was the same size and shape of the ships, and as shiny as the hulls of the ships were.

  When Skippy had explained that we needed to replace each transport ship with something of equal mass, I knew exactly what he meant. “Oh yeah,” I said confidently. “I saw that in that old Indiana Jones movie! He steals a golden statue, and replaces it with a bag of rocks or something. Is that what you plan to do?”

  “It was a bag of sand, Joe. And yes, I plan to do something like that.”

  “Hmm. I remember that didn’t work out so well for Indiana Jones.”

  “I will be much more careful, Joe. I promise.”

  “Good. Because if a giant rock starts rolling after me, I’m throwing you under it.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Skippy’s need for an Indiana Jones-type trick is why we came through the wormhole with three asteroids attached to the Dutchman, and why I was pleased we lost only minors bits of rock along the way.

  “Excellent,” I acknowledged Chang’s report. A minor amount of material flaking off the asteroids we could live with; we had carved up three asteroids until they were slightly more massive than the stranded transport ships. When we reached the ships and got good sensor data about their mass, we would trim each asteroid to the proper mass with the Dutchman’s maser cannons. I would have greatly preferred to cut the asteroids to size and install the balloon around them before going through the wormhole, but Skippy insisted he did not have accurate data on their masses and ‘albedo’, which I learned is a fancy sciency word for how shiny something is. I did not know why scientists couldn’t just use a normal word like ‘shininess’. “Pilot,” I ordered, “take us over to the nearest Kristang transport. And step on it.”

  The reason I wanted us to reach the target transports quickly became apparent ninety seven minutes later, when one of the local wormholes was scheduled to emerge into that part of space. Skippy had completed his scans of all three ships, and we were ready for the next phase of the operation, to tackle the next in Skippy’s list of ‘complications’. Before we could proceed with the next phase, we had to shut down everything but our stealth field, and tuck the Dutchman in behind one of the transports. Desai had the Dutchman’s nose practically touching one of the transports, with our pirate ship’s long, skinny hull stretched out facing away from the wormhole. To be safe, I ordered the ship into position thirty minutes early, in case we ran into last-minute glitches like a balky thruster.

  And it was a damned good thing we hid our pirate ship, because four minutes after the Elder wormhole popped into existence, two Thuranin star carriers came through. Between the two star carriers, they were transporting two battleships, four cruisers, a light cruiser and eight destroyers. I shuddered when I saw the destroyers, remembering how a squadron of those ships had nearly trapped and destroyed the Flying Dutchman. “That is a lot of firepower,” I said q
uietly, swallowing hard.

  “It is, Joe,” Skippy’s own voice was quieter than usual. “Right now, just one of those destroyers could tear this us apart. I rebuilt our pirate ship as best I could, but it’s kind of held together now with duct tape and a prayer.”

  “Thank you for boosting our confidence there, Skippy. Any chance those ships see us?”

  “Zippy chance of that,” he scoffed. “None of those ships are even actively scanning the area; they are relying on a feed from the local sensor network, and I control that. If they bother to look in this direction, what those ships are seeing over here are the dead hulks of three Kristang transports, and nothing else. My only concern was whether a ship might energize its active sensors, to tune them after coming through the wormhole. But these ships just left a Thuranin fleet shipyard, and they are in optimal condition. There is no reason for those ships to bother looking around. I am, hmm, that’s interesting.”

  “What?” Out where we were, ‘interesting’ was rarely ‘good’.

  “Joe, I just decrypted data from one of the star-”

  “Skippy! You promised you would not go poking around in the databases of those ships. They might detect something out here is spying on them.”

  “Cool your jets, Joe. I am not poking around anywhere. One of the star carriers transmitted their secret mission orders to the other carrier, and I intercepted the message. I have gotten better at decrypting Thuranin military transmissions, and this particular one was no challenge for me. What I find interesting is the objective in their orders; that pair of star carriers are going to join four others for an assault on a Jeraptha-controlled wormhole cluster. My question to you is whether it might benefit us to somehow pass that intelligence to the Jeraptha.”

  “Uh,” I looked at Chotek, who was standing in the CIC. “We’ll have to think about that, Skippy. It would depend on whether preventing a successful Thuranin attack would benefit us.”

  “And,” Chotek emphasized the word, “whether passing along that data poses a risk of revealing our presence.”

  “A risk? Ha! Oh, no way, dude!” Skippy chortled. “As if! I could include the data in a freakin’ birthday message to Jeraptha Fleet Command, and they would still have no idea where it came from. Chocula, since you are supposed to be the grand strategic thinker here, I expected you would see the value to humanity of the Jeraptha further securing their recent military gains in this sector. The more secure the Jeraptha are, the more peaceful this sector is, and that is all good for humans on both Earth and Paradise.”

  “I will,” Chotek replied with irritation, “consider it. After we complete the present operation. How long will those ships remain here?”

  “Not long,” Skippy’s voice sounded seriously peeved. He had offered what he thought was a valuable piece of information, and Chotek had dismissed it as a distraction.

  “Skippy,” I hurried to assure our friendly beer can, “that is excellent info, and an outstanding effort. You dug into that transmission on your own initiative, I appreciate it.” Hopefully, he would notice the use of ‘I’ rather than ‘we’. “How long is ‘not long’?”

  “Those carriers are already accelerating away from the wormhole, and using their shields to clear space in front of them for a jump. If they follow standard Thuranin procedure, they will jump away within eighteen minutes; shortly after the Elder wormhole closes.”

  I looked back to the CIC. “Colonel Chang, tell the away teams to be ready for departure in twenty minutes. I want us to get the hell out of here as fast as we can.”

  The next ‘complication’ in Skippy’s grand list of complications was trimming the asteroids to match the mass of the transport ships, then covering the rocks in the balloons and inflating them. This was sort of his Indiana Jones trick. Once the balloons were in place, their shells would harden, and Skippy could adjust the color of the shells to match the reflectivity of the ship hulls. At the distance the transports had drifted from the satellites of the sensor network, we didn’t need the balloon shells to look like the ships, just to reflect a similar amount of faint starlight in a roughly similar shape.

  Skippy, his bots and the CIC crew could handle carving up the asteroids, dispersing the debris, and installing the shrouds. Some of Skippy’s bots could also assist in the other ‘complication’ I was most worried about; locating and removing the booby traps.

  Skippy had explained that, because the Thuranin had not allowed the Kristang to self-destruct their abandoned ships, the lizards had very likely planted booby traps to prevent anyone from easily messing with them. Soon after we arrived at the first ship, Skippy’s scans had detected several explosive devices aboard, and he warned there were probably many more that external scans could not detect. We could not risk taking booby-trapped ships aboard the Dutchman’s docking platforms, so the explosives needed to be cleared first. With his bots, Skippy could help, but he did not have enough bots available to clear ships quickly enough. So, Major Smythe’s SpecOps team would have to suit up and go aboard the ships to clear the booby traps. It would be dangerous, and it would be necessary, and it needed to be done quickly. There was too much traffic through those two wormholes for us to take our time clearing the ships of explosives.

  Skippy had learned the Thuranin were launching a major operation to stabilize their losses in the sector; that meant the pair of wormholes would be experiencing extra traffic; both fresh ships coming from fleet shipyards, and ships in need of heavy maintenance returning to base. Ships coming in through the wormhole were not a serious danger to us; Skippy knew exactly when the wormholes were scheduled to be open, so we shut down operations twenty minutes before each wormhole appearance. Incoming ships did not linger long after coming through the wormholes; we waited ten minutes after each inbound ship departed, just to be safe.

  Ships seeking to go through the wormhole from our side were a serious threat, and a threat we could not predict. Ships jumped in from way beyond even Skippy’s sensor range, and they jumped in without any warning. We could not even rely on ships jumping in only shortly before one of the wormholes opened, because sometimes ships arrived hours before a wormhole emergence. Skippy tried to assure me that ships would rely on data from the sensor network he controlled, rather than looking around with their own sensor fields. I was still greatly concerned that during the time enemy ships were lingering; some ship’s ambitious sensor officer could try for the Employee of the Month award by nosily poking around the area with sensors, double-checking the feed from the local sensor network. The Dutchman had its stealth field operational 24/7, and any of our dropships flying around used a stealth field also, protecting us from being discovered by a casual sensor scan. Any sort of serious scan with a military-grade sensor field would certainly not miss the presence of our shrunken but still massive star carrier. The unexplained presence of a very odd-looking, stealthed Thuranin star carrier would prompt an immediate investigation by any Thuranin warship in the area, no matter what line of bullshit Skippy tried to feed the local sensor network.

  “Ready?” I asked the pilot of the dropship.

  “Yes, Colonel,” the French pilot acknowledged.

  “Punch it,” I ordered, and gripped the too-small Thuranin seat with both hands. It was unworthy of me as a commander to wish I had Desai flying the dropship, rather than the Frenchman. Gustov Renaud was a fine pilot, having flown the hottest Rafale fighters the French had in their inventory, and Desai had given him high marks on his evaluation. Still, I always felt more comfortable with Desai at the controls.

  The dropship rocketed out of the Flying Dutchman’s docking bay at the maximum acceleration its human occupants could stand, headed directly for the second Kristang transport ship. To prevent our activities from being discovered by Thuranin ships jumping in, we moved between our star carrier and the Kristang ships as quickly as possible, limiting our exposure time. That technique protected the away teams from being detected. To protect humanity, in case the Thuranin somehow did notice somethin
g funky going on near the stranded Kristang transports, each away team brought along an old friend of mine: Mr. Nukey. Our dropship’s tactical nuke was strapped into the seat beside me, happily emitting stray neutrons, but otherwise silently enjoying a chance to get away from the Dutchman and explore the universe. Join UN ExForce, I thought. See the galaxy, meet new people, and nuke them!

  Maybe that slogan needed some work.

  In case our pirate ship was detected by the Thuranin and had to jump away, an away team trapped aboard a Kristang transport was expected to trigger their nuke, to destroy all evidence of humans flying around the galaxy on our own. It sucked, and I wished there was a way around that unpleasant necessity, but I didn’t see an option. My personal plan, if I got trapped with nosy and pissed-off Thuranin approaching, was to wait until a Thuranin dropship got close enough, and let Mr. Nukey do what he did best. At least we would take some little green MFers with us.

  “Flight path is nominal,” Captain Renaud said in a French accent that my American ear found unintentionally snobbish, like he was looking down his nose at me. I don’t know why I still felt that way; I knew plenty of French Canadiens from living in Maine and they were good people. Of course, Canadians had a reputation of being as polite as the French reputation for being rude. “Cutting thrust now.”

  My stomach did a flipflop as the dropship was momentarily in zero-gee, then the pilot kicked thrust on hard to decelerate. “Approaching target,” he said, his voice reflecting the strain of forces five times Earth normal gravity. This was the tricky part of getting the away team into the docking bay of a Kristang transport. Skippy’s bots had cleared booby traps from a docking bay, and manually cranked the doors open. Our pilot needed to fly the dropship into the bay as quickly as possible, with no external guidance, and no safety margin from capture mechanisms in the bay. The ship ahead of us was dead, without even any reserve power. There may be a powercell or two still active aboard; they weren’t providing any power to the docking bay. We were trading the risk of crashing in the docking bay, with the risk of being exposed in empty space if a Thuranin ship jumped in and decided to look around. Since our pilots could mostly control the risk of crashing, I opted to let them fly and trust their skill and judgment.