Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  I looked over at Mr. Nukey, who some jokers had painted with a big purple Barney flipping the bird and saying ‘Greetings from Earth, MFers!’ with a moronic Barney grin.

  The greeting did not seem sincere to me. I was totally Ok with that.

  Our pilot must have thought he was landing a Rafale fighter on the deck of a carrier, because we came to a very abrupt halt that rattled my teeth. On the display in front of me, I could see we had still been moving at a good speed when the dropship’s tail entered the transport’s docking bay, and we had briefly pulled over eight gees to arrest our progress. Renaud was either very, very good, or he was showing off. Or both. Now the dropship wobbled slightly, then settled to the deck with a clanging sound as our skids clamped on firmly to the alien deck. “Thank you for flying Air France,” the pilot said smoothly. “There is a comment card under your seat, please feel free to ignore it.”

  I decided right then that Gustov Renaud was a damned good pilot.

  The giant docking bay doors, open to cold space, were on the side of the ship facing away from the wormholes so we didn’t have to worry about being detected once we were in the bay. To speed our exit, the doors were left open, which left the bay open to vacuum. That didn’t matter; everyone in the away team was wearing Kristang powered armor suits except the two pilots in the cockpit. They sealed the cockpit doors, then we popped open the dropship’s large rear ramp and let the air rush out. We couldn’t wait to cycle through the dropship’s airlock four people at a time, and the dropship had plenty of oxygen onboard. It was a credit to the professionalism of our SpecOps team that I did not see anything, not even a stray candy wrapper blowing around when we let the air out in a rush.

  Skippy’s bots had cleared the docking bay, and the inner airlock door, before he had to recall the bots to work on trimming the asteroids and installing their shrouds. We had two bots with us in the dropship; they were available because Skippy’s scans had determined one of the transports was in such bad condition, it wasn’t even useful as spare parts. That left only two ships to clear of booby traps, and we would only be able to make one functional Q-ship out of those two hulks. It was disappointing that we had come all the way out here, taken substantial risks and were expending a lot of effort, to make just one Q-ship.

  With only two bots available to our away team, our plan was for people to locate booby traps, and for Skippy to use the bots to disarm those IEDs. Skippy had already remotely rendered the larger booby traps inert, but he wasn’t able to do much about the crude, manually triggered devices the Kristang crews had cobbled together before they abandoned the ships and left their terrified passengers behind to die.

  By ‘locate’ booby traps, I did not mean for us to stumble across them and have them go ‘Boom’ in our faces. We had portable scanners that could see through doors, decks and bulkheads at short range. That’s a damned good thing, because sure enough, the inner airlock door had an IED that would explode if the door slid aside and pulled a wire with it. Seeing that on the scanner made me roll my eyes. I had dealt with more sophisticated IEDs in Nigeria, and I found it ironic that an advanced starfaring species like the Kristang relied on such crude devices. Crude did not mean ineffective, of course, that bomb could have killed the half dozen people of the SpecOps team. Instead, they reported their scanner’s findings to Skippy, and he had one of the bots drill a hole through a bulkhead, then reach a skinny tentacle around and disarm that IED. One door down, a hundred more to go, I thought to myself. We had to clear the entire ship, compartment by compartment, before it would be safe to take the transport on one of the Dutchman’s docking platforms. Our already shaky pirate ship could not afford to take any more damage.

  “Inner door is clear!” An Indian paratrooper reported. “Opening it manually now.”

  “Let’s move,” I said, unbuckling my seat restraints and standing up carefully, reminding myself that Kristang starships do not have artificial gravity even when they have power.

  “Are you sure, Colonel?” The question came from one of my babysitters, an Army Ranger named Paul Rodriguez. He and my semi-permanent shadow Lauren Poole had unofficially been assigned by Major Smythe to keep me out of trouble. Smythe probably thought that, me being US Army, I might feel more comfortable with Rangers. Or he thought I would protest less and be less of a whiny pain in the ass if my babysitters were Rangers. Either way, I was stuck with them and they were stuck with me.

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I tried being polite with my babysitters. All three of them, which included United States Marine Corps Staff Sergeant Margaret Adams. Whereas Major Smythe had assigned Rodriguez and Poole to babysit me, Skippy had arranged for Adams to accompany me.

  “We could wait for the forward team to clear the first passageway, Sir,” Adams suggested, in a voice that implied it was not quite a suggestion.

  “Adams,” I responded while swimming through vacuum toward the open rear ramp, “I know Skippy assigned you to keep me out of trouble. But you were supposed to keep Skippy out of trouble when we took the relay station, and you got into one hell of a firefight with the Thuranin.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Adams was not deterred. “That was one time. Skippy knows for sure that you are a magnet for trouble everywhere you go.”

  That was a statement I could not argue with. “Fine. Then your job is to keep me out of trouble, while we clear the ship of IEDs. This op is all hands on deck, Adams, I’m not going to sit on my ass aboard the Dutchman.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she replied unhappily. She wasn’t the only person unhappy about me going aboard a Kristang transport, most of the command crew had strongly urged me to remain aboard our pirate ship. I had vetoed that idea. This wasn’t Star Trek, I had told them, where the captain had to remain aboard the ship while an away team took all the risk. Colonel Chang was perfectly capable of running the ship in my absence, and Skippy wanted me on an away team, in case we ran into a situation that required, as Skippy put it, ‘a monkey-brain idea’.

  I took that as a compliment.

  “Colonel Bishop?” Lt Sodhi of the Indian team called over the link in my suit helmet. “Sir, could you come up here, please? I think you should see this.”

  “Make a hole, people,” I called over the broadcast channel. Adams propelled herself along right on my heels, with the two Rangers close behind. The Rangers were special forces, and they both outranked her, and Margaret Adams had made it crystal clear that she didn’t give a shit about any of that. My safety was her responsibility; the Rangers were welcome to tag along if they stayed out of her way.

  When I got to the inner airlock door, four soldiers were floating, hugging the airlock door frame. They turned to look at me, saying nothing as I pulled myself forward with slightly less grace than the special forces had. We had all been practicing zero gee combat maneuvers in our Kristang powered armor suits; I had devoted extra hours to that part of the training, as I didn’t want to let the team down if we went into action together. In combat, it was unlikely I would be able to do anything useful with a weapon compared to the SpecOps team, but being capable of handling myself in zero gee meant the professionals could concentrate on their jobs and not worry about me. It was the least I could do, since I had not made the sacrifices and commitment to qualify for special forces. And I wasn’t good enough anyway.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  Sodhi pointed to his left, then his right, silently.

  They were visible as soon as my helmet came through the airlock. On both sides, floating randomly in the passageway. Kristang bodies. They looked desiccated, like mummies. Before we arrived, Skippy had speculated that the lack of oxygen and bitter cold inside the ships would have preserved the bodies in some fashion; a possibility I had asked him not to discuss with anyone else. The bodies had been floating undisturbed for a long time, until we forced opened the airlock door and sucked out whatever atmosphere remained. Now, exposed to extreme cold and hard vacuum, the exposed lizard skin had crazed and cracked, freezing and burning
at the same time. It was ugly.

  Women and children. Kristang females and their young. Mostly. I saw only four adult males, in civilian clothing. Or they were wearing what I thought was Kristang civilian clothing; I knew it was not the black and yellow of Kristang military uniforms.

  “God.” I didn’t know what else to say. I couldn’t say anything else. Yes, we all knew the transports had been overloaded with civilian refugees, and we knew the Thuranin would not have allowed the Kristang to eject the bodies, because bodies would create a risk of ships smacking into them after coming through a wormhole. So we knew the ships would be full of bodies. Maybe the SpecOps people were ready for what they saw. I wasn’t.

  “Sir,” Sodhi drew my attention to an adult female. I knew she was a female due to her small size. “Gunshot wounds.”

  Looking closer, I saw he was right about the wounds. It wasn’t only that one Kristang; now that I knew what to look for, I saw many of the adults had wounds characteristic of bullet holes. In fact, all three of the adult males, all civilians, had more than one gunshot wound. “They killed them.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Sodhi nodded, I could see his helmet bobbing up and down. “My guess is this ship’s crew stripped their ship of everything useful, then retreated to the docking bay,” he pointed back through the airlock. “The passengers must have panicked when they saw they were being abandoned. I know I would. The crew killed them if they got in the way.”

  “Holy mother of God.” The passageway was only maybe thirty meters long, and it was crammed with mummified bodies. I wondered in horror whether the entire ship was like this; Kristang stacked on top of each other like cordwood. Skippy had told us the transports were ‘grossly overloaded’ with refugees, and that the ship’s environmental systems had struggled to provide enough oxygen. I should have asked him for a better definition of ‘grossly overloaded’ before we came aboard.

  My team seeing their commander stunned into inaction was not helpful. Everyone was feeling the same way; my job was to keep us focused on making sure humanity did not suffer the fate of these dead Kristang. “Lieutenant, if the passengers rushed toward the docking bays, it makes sense this part of the ship would be packed with people. Hopefully the rest of the ship isn’t like this. Get your scanning teams to clear this passageway in both directions, in case the crew booby trapped the bodies,” I had known militia crazies to do that in Nigeria. “We will work our way compartment by compartment, until we have identified all IEDs so Skippy can disarm them. I want teams limited to two-hour shifts; we need to be razor sharp and focused. Teams not active will return to the dropship to remove suits and get some R&R.”

  “Yes, Sir,” Sodhi agreed immediately, which surprised me. I had expected a hard-core special forces leader to insist his team did not need rest. Major Smythe must have impressed upon his SpecOps team that I would not tolerate any gung-ho cowboy bullshit. Or Sodhi simply understood we could not take any risks aboard these unfamiliar alien vessels. “We will need to move these bodies out of the way to get access farther into the ship.”

  “Right.” I called Captain Renaud in the dropship. “Captain, we need space in here, so we will be bringing, uh, bodies, into the docking bay. Get the outer doors closed so the bodies aren’t floating out into space.”

  “Colonel, may I suggest another idea?” Renaud asked. “We have netting in our gear locker. I suggest that I move the dropship to the end of the docking bay, and we stretch netting across the bay to contain, whatever it is you need to move into the bay.”

  “Good thinking, Captain.” I related the plan to Sodhi. “As you work your way down the passageway and verify there are no booby traps, pass the bodies back down through the airlock, and we’ll secure them.”

  I volunteered my team to set up the netting across the docking bay, and we formed a human chain to accomplish the grim task of passing mummified bodies along. After the passageway was cleared, blessedly none of the bodies had IEDs attached, we split up into teams of four, each team having two hand-held scanners. In our team, Rangers Poole and Rodriguez operated the scanners, while Adams and I tagged areas with verified or suspected IEDs, and used fancy Thuranin spray cans to paint a fluorescent orange check mark on compartments we had cleared.

  It was a tough job. Not physically, because our powered armor suits and the lack of gravity made moving around almost effortless. It was tough emotionally. The first ‘compartment’ we cleared was more of a storage locker, barely large enough to hold two sets of powered armor; we found a scene that almost made me have to take off my helmet in the vacuum. Because I almost puked and cried at the same time.

  In the locker was a Kristang female. A lizard. A member of the species that would wipe humanity off the face of the Earth without a second thought.

  This female was huddled in the locker, clutching three young Kristang, the four of them hugging each other. Even though her face was mummified, and now cracked from exposure to harsh vacuum, I thought I could sense the hopelessness and terror in her eyeless sockets.

  She must have taken shelter in the locker, clutching her children to her, as the food, water and oxygen ran out, as the crew stripped everything useful out of the ship, as the power died and darkness closed in. She had tried to comfort her children as best she could, knowing for certain there was nothing she could do for them. Knowing they were all going to die horribly of suffocation and frostbite.

  I reminded myself that Kristang females had been genetically engineered to be small, weak, docile and less intelligent. The creature, the woman, I saw in that locker had done her best to take care of her children, in the only way she knew, the only way she could. The only way she was allowed to by her murderous species.

  Adams backed away, bent over double. She was also struggling not to lose her breakfast on the inside of her helmet.

  “Breathe deep, Sergeant,” I suggested. A glance at our two Rangers told me they were not having an easy time of it either. Telling Adams to take deep, calming breaths helped me do the same, and focusing on the three members of my team distracted me from my own disgusted nausea.

  “Yes, Sir.” Adams straightened up, her face pale inside the helmet. “No excuses, Colonel.” Droplets of tears floated freely in her helmet, some beading up on the faceplate.

  I held her shoulders and pressed my faceplate against hers, looking her directly in the eyes. “No excuse needed, Staff Sergeant. If you are not emotionally affected by this,” I gestured to the dead family in the locker, “then I don’t need you in my crew. These Kristang, these people, are not our enemies. Their warrior caste is. Not these civilians. Not defenseless women and children.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she shook her head, but she shook it angrily. And she gently pushed herself away from me. “I’m all right, Colonel.”

  “None of us are all right, Adams. We’re doing our job anyway, because we have to.”

  “Colonel Bishop,” Poole called. “These people were stranded here by the Thuranin crew of our ship? The Flying Dutchman?”

  “Yes,” I confirmed. “Our ship didn’t have a name back then, but yes. Our ship did this.”

  “Because the Kristang couldn’t pay?” She asked incredulously.

  “Because their clan couldn’t pay for passage aboard a star carrier. Skippy told me the story is, the Kristang were evacuating a planet; they packed these ships full of refugees. The Thuranin picked up these transports, but halfway to their destination, the Thuranin learned the Kristang clan couldn’t come up with payment. If the Thuranin support a Kristang military operation, they transport the warships and support vessels for free. Apparently, if the Kristang want transport that doesn’t directly support Thuranin interests, the clan has to pay for the ride.” I looked down the passageway, to the dozens of doors to compartments and lockers we needed to clear. “By the time the clan scraped together the cash or whatever they sue for payment, most of the people aboard these transports were dead. Thousands of them.”

  Poole took a deep breath, loud enough tha
t I could hear it over the comm system. “Colonel, during the pre-mission briefing on Earth, we went over the records of your first two missions aboard the Dutchman. One of the topics was the incident when you put the Thuranin crew in a container, and jumped them inside a gas giant planet. Sir,” she looked at me, the lights on the side of her helmet illuminating my face. “There was some discussion about whether you committed a war crime by killing those sleeping Thuranin.”

  “I have wondered that myself,” I admitted. At the time, I was so fearful about the Thuranin, I did not consider too deeply the morality of what I did. Later, I had been able to rationalize my actions as necessary at the time. The incident did keep me awake some nights. “Maybe I could have kept them locked up somewhere, until we got to Earth and UNEF Command could take them as prisoners of war. But at the time, we had just seized an alien starship, and I didn’t know if we would ever see Earth again-”

  “Maybe you should stop thinking about it, Sir,” Poole declared emphatically. “The former crew of the Dutchman got better treatment than they deserved.” I could see she had a tear welling up in the corner of one eye.

  “There is a higher authority that will judge me for that, Poole.” By ‘higher authority’, I didn’t just mean Chotek, Skippy, UNEF Command or the United States Army. “This locker is clear,” I closed the door and sprayed an orange check mark on it. “Let’s keep moving.”

  I was in the process of suiting up again in the dropship, getting ready for another two hour shift clearing IEDs, when Skippy pinged me. “Trouble, Joe. Five Thuranin ships just jumped in, and the next wormhole emergence isn’t for another eight hours and sixteen minutes. We already ceased operations on trimming and covering the two asteroids, before you ask.”