Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “Environmental systems are functional,” I observed in a shaky voice. Good. We would not suffocate from lack of oxygen, or freeze to death as the ship’s residual heat radiated away into the bitter cold of space. “Captain Renaud, keep, doing, uh,” I couldn’t think of anything useful he or anyone else could do at that moment. “Send someone to the lifeboat,” I meant the Thuranin relay station that was attached to one of our docking platforms. “Get a status of the lifeboat’s systems, and see if anyone can contact Nagatha there.” I was not optimistic. Skippy had warned me that as a submind, she was an integral part of his being or matrix or whatever you wanted to call it. Nagatha had functioned on her own aboard the relay station while our pirate ship was away, but she had outgrown the capacity of the Thuranin computers there, and Skippy had pulled most of her functioning inside his own. My hope was that part of Nagatha still remained aboard the lifeboat; enough to communicate with us. I didn’t need witty conversation, a text message would be Ok with me.

  “Yes, Sir. Colonel, where are you going?” Renaud asked as I spun and headed back out the door, running carefully as the main display on the bridge had indicated the artificial gravity was adjusting down to its minimum, low-power setting. If it shut off completely, we were going to have problems, as many systems humans used aboard the ship were poorly adapted to zero gravity. Most importantly, the humans ourselves.

  “I’m going to check on Skippy,” I explained. The ship schematic on the display showed the icon for Skippy’s escape pod was still attached to the ship; I was hoping there had been some glitch or accident, and Skippy wasn’t communicating because he was actually spinning off into space with the escape pod. That was a bogus hope, because physical separation of a few hundred yards, or a few million miles, would not stop Skippy from being able to contact us. If bogus hope was all I had to cling to, I was going with it.

  No such luck. The escape pod was where it always was, with the hatch open. Inside, his motionless beer can was strapped into a seat. “Skippy?” I called out, feeling foolish, as if I needed to be in the escape pod for him to hear me. “If this is a practical joke, it is not funny even one tiny bit.”

  There was no response. Cautiously, I tapped his lid with a finger, then I pressed a fingertip against his smooth, shiny surface. He was warm, almost hot. Whatever was wrong with Skippy, he was still in there, and something was going on inside that can. I debated ducking back through the hatch and ejecting the escape pod, then had a better idea. I pulled him out of the straps, and squeezed back through the hatch into the passageway, where a crowd had gathered. As we were aboard a ship, I should have used the Navy term ‘gangway’ but since I am Army, I said “Make a hole, people,” as I ran with unusually long strides back to the bridge. “Renaud, I’m taking Skippy away from here in a dropship. Get the ship moving in the other direction if you can.”

  “Where are you going, Sir?” Renaud asked anxiously.

  “Skippy’s can is warm and growing hot,” I explained. “I’m getting him away from the ship, in case he explodes or loses containment or something.”

  I got a dropship launched within seven minutes of securing the airlock door; it took longer than a typical emergency launch because I had to do everything manually. We kept one of the smaller Thuranin Falcon dropships on Zulu alert as a ready bird, so all I needed to do was hop in and close the hatch; it was already powered up. Fortunately, all the controls and displays aboard the dropship were in English; I had been fearing that without Skippy they would revert to their native Thuranin script. The big docking bay doors responded to my command to open, even though I had to hit the override twice since the bay was still partially pressurized. I did regret the loss of breathable air aboard a ship with environmental systems operating on backup power, and I balanced that against the risk of Skippy exploding and losing the entire ship.

  As soon as the dropship cleared the doors, I punched the throttle and accelerated away at three and a half Gees, then went to a sustained five Gees. All I cared about was getting away from the Dutchman as fast as possible, in empty interstellar space there wasn’t any particular direction for me to go anyway. I picked a star at random and set the autopilot to aim for it. When we passed a hundred thousand kilometers from the ship, I cut thrust and let the dropship coast outward at high speed. One hundred thousand klicks was not any scientific measurement of a safe distance in case Skippy exploded, it was just a nice round number and I could not take five gravities of load on my body any longer. My back was killing me; it would have been better for me to have taken two seconds to get comfortable in the seat before engaging the main engines.

  What really mattered was that Skippy had not exploded and destroyed the Flying Dutchman. Unstrapping from my seat, I floated over to the little guy and checked his temperature. “Dutchman, this is Bishop,” I called through the dropship’s comm system. “Skippy is still warm, he may be warmer than he was before, I can’t tell. No response from him yet. Have you been able to access the lifeboat, or contact Nagatha?”

  Chang replied after a brief pause; the ship was already far enough away that signal lag was noticeably already. “A team just entered the relay station from a docking bay, they report backup power is engaged because the reactor there also shut down. Nagatha is not responding there or here. The science team was able to get artificial gravity cut off here six minutes ago; we couldn’t take the power drain, so now we’re all floating in zero gee. Dr. Friedlander has his teams working to assure the environmental systems continue to run on backup power, then he will concentrate on restarting one of the reactors.”

  “Is he confident he can do that without blowing up the ship?” I asked, without intending any kind of a joke.

  “He doesn’t not know yet. Sir, if we can’t get a reactor restarted-” He didn’t finish the thought because he didn’t need to.

  “Yeah, I know. Do the best you can over there, I will monitor Skippy here.” At some point soon, I would have to decelerate so I didn’t get too far from the ship. If Skippy woke up, I wanted to get him back aboard the Dutchman as quickly as possible.

  “Understood. Colonel Bishop? Mister Chotek wishes to speak with you.”

  Of course he did. An already crappy day was getting better every minute. No doubt Chotek was going to blame the incident on me. Better that he take his anger and fear out on me via voice communication, than making life miserable for people aboard the ship. I took a deep breath. “Mister Chotek?”

  Smythe called me six hours later; the crew had been taking turns calling me every hour. “How are you doing out there, Colonel?”

  “I am not well chuffed, Major. You might even say I am not close to being chuffed at all.” With the timelag in the transmissions, the conversation was awkward.

  “It’s not your fault, Sir,” he assured me, because much of the crew had heard Chotek berating me.

  “I know. Skippy was going to go poking around in that dead AI canister whether I approved of it or not. We don’t even know if that was related to him going AWOL or not,” I said, although that coincidence was tough to argue against. “What bothers me now is that we are completely out of options. Humanity, I mean.”

  “How so, Sir?” I took the tone of his question to mean genuine interest, he was not merely humoring me as I sped away into the void.

  “Chotek’s backup plan, if the Ruhar reach Earth and our secret gets out, is to hand over Skippy and the Elder wormhole controller module. Unless Skippy comes back to life, or by some miracle Friedlander finds a way to fly us to civilization, Earth will have the worst of all possible options. After the Ruhar return with info about Earth, both sides of the war will quickly learn humans have been screwing with Elder wormholes, but UNEF Command won’t be able to offer a wormhole controller, or an Elder AI to make it work. Earth won’t even be able to give a hint where to find us. Aliens will tear our little planet apart to find whatever they think we’re hiding.”

  “That would certainly bollocks things up,” Smythe agreed. “I’m su
re you’ll think of something, Sir.”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking, or trying to cheer me up. “Has Dr. Friedlander made any progress?”

  “He thinks we could eventually restore normal space propulsion, right now Lt. Colonel Chang has them working on restarting one of the reactors. Chang said the ability to fly in normal space is useless without a place to go, and we’d be draining the capacitors for nothing. The jump drive coils are charged enough for one jump, that’s not enough to get us anywhere useful. From here, we can’t even jump to a place where we could signal either side to surrender. By the time our signal reached anyone, everyone aboard the ship would be dead.”

  That got me thinking. Certainly, everyone aboard the ship would be dead, but if we sent a signal to the Ruhar or Jeraptha, the signal could tell them to come pick up an Elder wormhole controller, and possibly an Elder AI if Skippy was functional again by then. My hope was such an offer might give Earth a tiny bit of consideration from the Rindhalu, if they or the Maxolhx hadn’t already ransacked Earth, searching for a device humans used to screw with Elder wormholes.

  I would keep that idea to myself, until it became our only option. Or our best option, which would be the same thing at that point.

  Smythe and I talked for a while longer; neither of us were good at small talk so the conversation petered out. “Any change in Skippy?” He asked.

  “No,” I replied. “He’s still sitting there, not responding. The good news is he has not gotten any warmer.” I had feared Skippy’s beer can would grow so hot that I would need to toss him out an airlock. Part of me had selfishly hoped he would explode. That would kill me instantly, and save me the trouble of suffocating or freezing to death aboard the Dutchman with everyone else. It looked like I would not be taking the easy way out.

  “He is a safe distance from the ship now, Sir. What are your plans?”

  I knew Smythe meant when would I give up, leave Skippy there in space, and fly the dropship back to our slowly dying pirate starship? The answer was, I was in no hurry to do that. The dropship had enough food aboard to sustain one person for a month; that had been my idea after I had once gotten trapped aboard a dropship with hardly any food. In my opinion, there would be no point to my flying back to the Dutchman without a functioning Skippy. As that little shithead was fond of mentioning, I could barely figure out how shoelaces worked; I would be useless in trying to get the reactors or jump drive functioning. The best thing I could do for the Merry Band of Pirates was to stay a safe distance away from the ship with Skippy. That way, if he did wake up, I could bring him back to the ship as quickly as possible. Checking the rations aboard, I calculated I could stretch the food to six weeks before I became too weak to fly the dropship. Considering my math skills, maybe I’d be dead by then. Whatever.

  Smythe signed off with a promise to contact me again with a status report every hour. I appreciated it, and asked him to tell Chang to concentrate on the ship and crew, rather than speaking uselessly with me.

  From what I had heard so far, the science team was not accomplishing much useful aboard the ship anyway.

  Twelve hours and some minutes had gone by since Skippy went AWOL on us. I had just finished talking with Sergeant Adams, she drew the short straw to be the one to check in with me at the hour mark. I shouldn’t have said that, that was unfair to her. She was nice and didn’t make the conversation any more awkward that it had to be; with her aboard a dying ship and me floating in space two hundred fifty thousand miles away. I had decelerated the dropship to keep a constant distance from the Flying Dutchman; a distance I hoped was far enough away for the ship to survive if Skippy lost containment and exploded. The science team was still sort of working on getting a reactor restarted, but they had put that on a lower priority, as Dr. Friedlander thought it unlikely they could successfully restart a reactor before the backup power failed and carbon dioxide began building up inside the ship. If, or when, that happened, part of the crew could get into dropships and survive there for nearly a month. Others could use Kristang spacesuits to survive for a short time; neither option was truly a solution. What Friedlander had his team working on was using the jump drive capacitors to power the life support system. Heat and lights would be great, what the ship really needed was to restore power to the fancy Thuranin system that cracked carbon away from carbon dioxide molecules and provided breathable free oxygen. Our science team understood the basic theory of how that oxygen recycling system worked, all they needed to do was supply power. The jump drive capacitors apparently did not store power using the electromagnetic force in any way we monkeys could understand, and the power was not designed to flow out of the capacitors into the ship. Despite the obstacles, Friedlander’s team thought reversing the power flow was a more realistic option than attempting to restart an advanced alien reactor. Adams told me Chang was considering the idea, if the science team had confidence they could extract power from the capacitors in a controlled manner, and not blow up the ship in a blinding flash of light. The concept sounded crazy to me, but as I was not the commander on the scene and Chang was, I kept my mouth shut. This was a case where we had to trust Friedlander and his team; no one else aboard truly had the knowledge base to make a judgment call. Adams assured me Friedlander did not want to even attempt to screw with the unholy power in a jump drive capacitor, until backup power was below fifty percent.

  After ending the call with Adams, I floated in the dropship’s cabin, looking out a tiny window, trying to see the Dutchman with a naked eye. Our star carrier, even in its new shrunken form, was massive though spindly. The skinny spine could not be seen from that distance, and the docking platforms were also relatively slender. The best I could hope for was to be watching as the bulk of the forward section, the aft power and propulsion module, or the relay station we had brought along as a lifeboat would pass in front of a distant star, and I would see that star dim briefly. During the minutes I watched, I didn’t see anything, so I gave up and checked the Dutchman using the dropship’s sensors. The ship was easy to see with Thuranin optical technology, rather than the old Mark One eyeball. Since the stealth field was powered down, I got a good look at our pirate ship. It was beat up, and it was beautiful, an oasis of breathable air in the cold dark of interstellar space. Until that air ran out.

  I floated over to a supply cabinet, poking around the food containers without enthusiasm. There was plenty of food for me, and I knew I should eat something, I just wasn’t hungry. There was also a bottle of magical pills Skippy had created that would counteract the negative effects of long-term zero gravity on the human body. I shook the bottle, then put it back. If I was in the dropship long enough for my eyes to be affected and my muscles to atrophy, then a bottle of pills would not solve the big problem.

  Skippy. I closed the cabinet door and floated over to the chair he was strapped into. He was warm, though no warmer than he had been for the past eleven hours, since I figured out how to use the glove of a Kristang spacesuit as a temperature gauge. In a totally useless move, I touched his can with a bare finger. Definitely warm, something was going on in there. Whether Skippy was still in there, I had no way of knowing.

  In another totally useless move, I unstrapped him and picked him up. In zero gee he didn’t weigh anything, he still had mass and I thought maybe he was lighter than before. That was another thing I should have checked.

  Then I got tears in my eyes, which is damned inconvenient in zero gravity. Tear droplets don’t run down your cheeks, they well up and float in front of you, sometimes getting caught on your eyelashes where they get drawn back into your eyes and sting again. Skippy, the Asshole Almighty, and my friend. Skippy had lamented that his first ever friend was a monkey; my best friend was a beer can. Cradled in my hands, he looked so small, so vulnerable, lost and alone. If something had happened to him and he was truly gone, then he had survived millions of years of loneliness only to die after a short time awake. He never did contact the Collective, whatever the hell that was.
And he died completely alone, possibly the last of his kind and not knowing.

  Holding him in my hands was useless, not that I had anything else to do. Except I should have used the abundant free time to try thinking of a way to fix the problem. The way I justified cradling his beer can was that perhaps me touching him and getting teary-eyed would be so disgusting to him, that he would come back from wherever he had gone. After a couple minutes of self-indulgence, I strapped him back in and wracked my brain for a way out of our dilemma. Four hours later, I had a grand total of nothing.

  Hans Chotek returned to his office after a grim meeting with Dr. Friedlander. The science team was pessimistic about the prospect of even short-term survival aboard the ship; with main power cut off, carbon dioxide was already double the normal level. Thuranin technology used some sort of power-intensive magical technology to strip carbon away from CO2 molecules and produce breathable oxygen, the ship didn’t have a backup system like lithium hydroxide filters. On the recommendation of Friedlander, half the crew had been moved into dropships, which had their own life support systems. That desperate measure would only be useful for a short time. Unless main power could be restored, the entire crew was doomed to die in the cold wasteland of interstellar space. Chotek met Major Smythe striding down a passageway, and waved the SAS soldier into his office. “Major, Dr. Friedlander tells me he is not optimistic about getting a reactor restarted. I should have insisted that Skippy train the science team to fully operate the ship, even if only the emergency systems. No. I should have insisted that Colonel Bishop order Skippy to train the crew more effectively.”

  “Sir,” Smythe sat still in his seat, having trained himself not to wriggle when uncomfortable. “Whatever happened to Skippy, it cannot be blamed on Colonel Bishop.”

  “Can’t it?” Chotek asked with raised eyebrows. “Bishop knows our alien AI far better than any of us do; I find it difficult to believe he did not know Skippy was having some sort of problem before he went silent. Or that Skippy was taking some type of ill-advised risk. It is at times like this, Major, I am convinced more than ever that Bishop is too young and inexperienced to be entrusted with such a vital responsibility.”