Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “Yeah, yeah,” he grumbled. “Crap, Ok, it just missed the next three shots. It’s not me, Joe, that’s the way I programmed the subminds running those ships. All missiles are away, tubes are empty on both ships. The Q-ship is- uh, the Q-ship just took hits from five maser cannons and a pair of railgun darts. Engines are disabled, shields are holding for the moment. Eleven missiles are now targeting the Q-ship. Interesting. Only two missiles are from the Ruhar, the other nine are Kristang. Ha! The Kristang commander is assuring the Ruhar this attack is not by the Fire Dragon clan. The Ruhar are replying that anyone can see the Glory is a Kristang frigate. Hee hee, let’s see the Fire Dragons talk their way out of that mess, huh?”

  “Should we self-destruct the Q-ship,” I asked anxiously, “or let the missiles destroy it?”

  “Both, I think,” Skippy answered. “I’ll set it to self-destruct just before the first missiles impact. A real Kristang suicide team would wait until the last second.”

  I turned to catch Chotek’s eye; he didn’t intervene, so I turned my attention back to the display. “Do that, Skippy. The Glory is taking hits now?”

  “Yes, my submind had it zigzagging nicely, but I had to let the Kristang score a hit or they would suspect something is odd with our frigate. Portside shields are getting pounded by maser cannons, the submind is rolling the ship to take hits on the starboard shields. One of the Ruhar destroyers is turning to unmask its railgun, and- Whoa! Wow. Direct hit with a railgun penetrator, went right through the Glory’s hull. Damn! Ha ha! Wow! What are the odds of that, the freakin’ railgun didn’t hit anything vital.”

  On the display, the Glory staggered, then thrusters flared and the little ship righted itself and continued to desperately burn toward the cruiser, which was accelerating to get away. The projected course on the display showed the Glory had no chance to crash into the cruiser unless the cruiser stupidly flew in the wrong direction. I opened my mouth to ask a question, when the image on the display flared white hot. The To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious, the unlucky little frigate that had survived too long against the odds, was finally gone. “Was that your doing, Skippy?”

  “No, I never had time to activate the self-destruct mechanism. The Glory took two Kristang maser cannon hits at the same time as a Ruhar railgun dart ran through her from bow to stern. Her reactor exploded. I have released control of the Q-ship self-destruct to her submind; I won’t have time to react before- There she goes,” he added quietly. The Q-ship flared on the display, even more brightly than the Glory’s death fires.

  “What was the damage to the Ruhar?” Chotek demanded as his hands grasped the back of my chair.

  “Minor,” Skippy reported, blessedly sticking to the facts rather than insulting Chotek. “We scored nine maser hits total, and two missiles impacted the cruiser’s shields. Five more of our missiles are still inbound to the target, but they are being fired upon by both sides, and I expect them all to be destroyed. The worst damage to the Ruhar was caused by the Glory exploding; some of that high-speed debris almost overloaded the cruiser’s shields.”

  Following the destruction of our two ships in the mock attack, we hung around the area, monitoring the aftermath through the microwormholes that were still coasting through the area. Chotek was exultant because ten minutes after our Q-ship exploded, the Ruhar cruiser began accelerating toward the edge of the Kristang damping field. The Kristang ships moved out of the way to give the Ruhar plenty of space, and the two Ruhar destroyers stayed behind to continue projecting their own damping fields, so no Kristang ships could jump away. A lot of message traffic was flying back and forth between the Ruhar and the Fire Dragons. The Fire Dragons apologized profusely, to the point where Skippy said they must truly be desperate, because they were humiliating themselves in a very un-Kristang-like way. The Fire Dragons assured the Ruhar they were not involved in the attack, and vowed to both investigate who conducted the dastardly attack, and punish the perpetrators. The Ruhar replied that they needed to reassess the situation; Skippy told us the language they used was not the mealy-mouthed diplomatic speech which indicated the negotiations had a prayer of continuing. To my surprise, instead of being insulted by Skippy’s characterization of diplomats, Chotek was pleased. He had been involved in many difficult negotiations in his career, and he advised me that if the Ruhar’s language did not leave the door open for future talks, then future talks were unlikely.

  Hans Chotek was not the only person aboard the ship in a near-jubilant mood; Major Simms reported to me that Chotek had asked her to have bottles of champagne chilled and ready for when the Ruhar officially declared the negotiations cancelled. I was in the unusual position of having to caution him to control his enthusiasm. The last thing I wanted was for the Merry Band of Pirates’ hopes to be crushed again.

  Around nineteen hours after our attack, Skippy called me while I was trying to relax in my cabin. “Hey, Joe, are you asleep?”

  “You know I’m not, Skippy.” My intention had been to sneak in a quick nap, but sleep had eluded me, so I was reading a book. Not a report, not another PowerPoint slide, a real book. It was keeping me from spending all my time worrying. We learned the Ruhar cruiser had not returned home, it had only jumped one lighthour away, and was simply hanging in space. That development was troubling; until the Ruhar jumped for home, there was a possibility of the negotiations resuming. “What’s up?”

  “Just intercepted a transmission from the Kristang destroyer that recovered a damaged escape pod from the Glory. They completed their analysis, and they are not happy. Some of the software code buried in the escape pod’s operating system points to the attack having been conducted by the Top Hill subclan. Apparently the software was supposed to erase itself, but the damage to the pod interrupted the erasure process. The Fire Dragon leaders over there are furious; it seems the Top Hills have some ‘splainin’ to do, hee hee. There is a debate going on about whether to tell the Ruhar who was responsible for the attack. Some of the leaders are saying that revealing the attacker were a subclan of the Fire Dragons makes them look weak and hurts their negotiating posture. Other leaders think that being honest would surprise the Ruhar, and demonstrate how serious the Fire Dragons are about reaching a deal. This faction also states the Ruhar are not stupid; the attack happened so soon after they arrived, so the Ruhar already suspect the attackers must have had inside information.”

  “Hmmm. What do you think? Should we somehow let the Ruhar know about it?”

  “I do not know, Joe. I hate to say this, but Chotek would be the best person to ask. He would have the best perspective on how this information might affect the negotiations.”

  “Crap. We can’t tell him now; he would demand to know how that software came to be in the escape pod.”

  “I could tell him I did that on my own initiative, Joe,” Skippy suggested.

  “No,” I tossed my tablet on the bed in disgust. “He wouldn’t believe you did that without asking me. And it would only make him even more distrustful of you.”

  “You may be right about that. If it makes you feel any better, Chotek may be an expert on negotiating, but he knows little about Kristang or Ruhar psychology. I am an expert in those fields, and right now, even I cannot predict how the Ruhar would react to learning the Top Hill clan carried out the attack.”

  “Ok, then we wait.” I wasn’t happy about passively waiting for the Fire Dragons to make a decision; most of my unhappiness was because I knew I should have thought through what to do when the Kristang discovered the evidence Skippy had planted. This was an example of what Chotek said was my worst failing as a commander; I reacted to events, rather than thinking ahead and controlling my own fate. In this case, I had to agree with Chotek.

  My angst about what to do didn’t last long; Skippy reported the Fire Dragons had decided to tell the Ruhar about the Top Hill clan’s involvement. Shortly after, one of the Ruhar destroyers sent a long, encrypted transmission to their cruiser that was waiting one lighthour away. The cruise
r replied, but it didn’t leave. Skippy, of course, decrypted the messages; we learned the Ruhar were still evaluating the situation. By now, even Chotek’s jubilant mood was growing impatient. The champagne was on hold.

  As the last of our microwormholes was speeding onward out of range, the two Ruhar destroyers still had not moved, and their cruiser was holding position one lighthour away. That was odd, I thought to myself. One of the Kristang destroyers had broken formation, flown to the edge of the damping field, and jumped away six hours before, and Skippy later detected a gamma ray burst from a Thuranin ship jumping in near where that Kristang destroyer had gone. I was on the bridge, crowded in with Chotek, Smythe and Simms. Chang was the duty officer in the command chair, being good-natured about the visitors squashed together around him. Chotek brushed past me to trace a fingertip on the main display. “When this last microwormhole passes out of range, we will have no way to know the status of the ships, or to intercept communications?”

  Skippy answered before I could speak. “We will have limited data on the position of the ships. That data will be thirty seven minutes old, and will only contain data from the Dutchman’s passive sensors.” Our current position was thirty seven lightminutes from the cluster of Ruhar and Kristang ships, that was about the closest safe approach we would make. “As to intercepting communications, not even I can do that from here. Both sides are using tightbeam transmissions; I have been picking up the backscatter. We’re too far away for that without the wormholes.”

  “Is there any way we can turn the microwormholes around, or get new ones to the area?” Chotek put his arms across his chest in frustration.

  “By ‘we’, you mean ‘me’, right?” Skippy was annoyed. “No, dumdum, I can’t turn the wormholes around; I told you that. I could transmit power through them that would eventually change their course, even make them turn around. That would take months, and the wormholes would be visible the whole time. As to more wormholes, we could shoot the far ends into position with our railguns, except, oops, took our railgun apart because I needed the materials to fix the ship on our last mission. We’ll need to use another dropship.”

  We had plenty of dropships, that didn’t mean I wanted to waste them. And dropship, even unmanned, accelerated too slowly to be useful. “Skippy,” I asked, “what about using missiles to carry wormholes over there?” He used a missile to position a microwormhole above the planet Newark on our last mission.

  “We would need one missile for each wormhole,” Skippy cautioned me. “Each wormhole will provide about ninety minutes of coverage. We don’t have a lot of missiles aboard, Joe, and I can’t make more of them without a lot of time and materials.”

  “Sir,” I turned to Chotek. “When we launched the original set of wormholes, we didn’t expect the Ruhar would still be trying to make a decision after three days. I think we can live with gaps in coverage, as long as we get the big picture. I recommend that we fire six missiles, spaced one hour apart. That will give us another fourteen hours of coverage,” I concluded, hoping I had gotten the math right in my head. “If we have used the six missiles and still do not know the status of the negotiations, we will have to consider alternative means of monitoring the situation. We can’t use up all our missiles.”

  Chotek considered for a moment, then nodded. “Agreed. We need to know whether your mock attack plan gave us the desired results. Proceed.”

  I noticed that he referred to the attack as my plan, now that he was no longer confident of its success. Clearly, Hans Chotek was not taking any blame if we failed. “Skippy, get the first microwormhole loaded into a missile. Have you figured out yet why that Thuranin ship jumped in near the Fire Dragon’s destroyer?”

  “No,” his voice was discouraged. “Clearly, the Thuranin are talking to that destroyer. So far, the destroyer has not transmitted a message to the ships at the negotiation site. If I have to make a guess, I think the Thuranin likely demanded to know what the hell went wrong; how the Fire Dragons screwed things up this time.”

  We fired three missiles, and had a fourth ready in the launch tube, when Skippy called me in my office. His avatar popped into life on my desk. “Joe, the Kristang destroyer that met with the Thuranin ship just jumped. I assume it jumped back to the negotiation site, but a gap in coverage just began sixteen minutes ago, so we won’t have any intel from the negotiation site for thirty eight minutes.”

  “Crap. Launch the ready missile now,” I ordered.

  “That missile is not due to launch for another-”

  “I know. Do it anyway, do it now.”

  “I need to contact the CIC to press the button. Ok, missile is away. Light from the negotiation site will reach the missile first, so we will know whether that destroyer jumped there in twenty six minutes. Wormhole coverage will begin in forty minutes.”

  That gap in coverage, which had been a calculated risk by me, was maddening, and it was the best Skippy could do. “I’ll tell Chotek personally.”

  When the ready missile carrying a microwormhole got close enough to the negotiation site, it picked up signals that Skippy was able to decrypt. “Hmmm,” the beer can said quietly. “Ooooh, that’s not good.”

  “What’s not good?” I asked, not needing to look at Hans Chotek to know he was already glaring at me. “Are the negotiations going to continue or not?”

  “The negotiations will not continue, Joe.” I was about to pump a fist in the air when Skippy continued. “They don’t need to continue, because the negotiations have already concluded.”

  “What happened?” I forced myself to be calm, while fearing the worst.

  “Well, heh, heh,” Skippy began, and everyone’s hair stood on end. We all knew what it meant when that asshole beer can said those three words. “This is a funny story-”

  “Funny like ha ha, or like planetary extinction?” I asked the question on everyone’s minds.

  “The, uh, second one. I guess that’s not so funny after all, huh?”

  “What the hell happened?” I caught Chotek glaring daggers at me out of the corner of my eye.

  “Gosh, you know the Law of Unintended Consequences? That’s not a physical law, like thermodynamics or the law of gravity. Of course, your primitive species only thinks those are laws because you don’t understand the basic principles of-”

  “Skippy,” I said through clenched teeth. “Get to the point, please. What unintended consequences?”

  “Joe,” his voice was nervous. “Remember you told me to pass intel to the Jeraptha, warning them about the Thuranin offensive?”

  “Yeah. Why? Was the intel you gave them bogus?”

  “Bogus? No way, dude. Please. You’re talking about Skippy the Magnificent. Bogus intel,” he chuckled. “That’s a good one. No, the intel was solid, it told the Jeraptha exactly when and where the Thuranin would be launching the offensive.”

  “What happened? The Thuranin won the battle anyway?”

  “No, of course not,” snarkiness was creeping back into Skippy’s voice, and his avatar was standing up straighter. “The Thuranin got their asses handed to them on a platter. They got crushed, Joe. They lost almost all of the ships in all three task forces assigned to the operation. The Jeraptha even bagged the star carriers the Thuranin thought would be at a safe distance from the battle. The only drawback to the Jeraptha is their two admirals involved are in a heated argument over whose ships should get credit for which kills; each of them wagered a substantial amount on the outcome and now they have sent for a neutral arbiter to determine who won the bet. Anywho, the reason this matters to us is the Thuranin got their asses kicked so soundly, their whole defensive posture in the sector is in danger of collapse. And, hee, hee, this is why it’s kind of a funny story,” Skippy giggled nervously. “I mean like ‘ha ha’ funny, if you think about it. It’s ironic, in the true definition of the word, not the stupid way hipsters say ‘ironic’.”

  “Please, Skippy, get to the point. What is ironic?”

  “Remember whe
n I said I could not think of any possible downside to giving that intel to the Jeraptha? It turns out I was, what’s the word I’m looking for?”

  “Wrong?” I guessed.

  “Yeah, that’s it. The Thuranin got beat up so badly they can’t afford their clients to be distracted by a civil war right now, so the Thuranin instructed the Fire Dragons to make a very tempting offer to the Ruhar, backed by assets and guarantees of the Thuranin. The Ruhar were pleasantly surprised, and they accepted.”

  “Holy shit,” I slumped back in my chair. “We screwed ourselves by passing that intel to the Jeraptha?”

  “Uh huh, yeah,” Skippy said in a cheery tone. “That’s why I said it was an unintended consequence, Joe. Hee hee. Ain’t life funny sometimes?” He chuckled and I felt like strangling him. “As a result of the disastrous battle, the Thuranin are now willing to make a deal to delay a Kristang civil war, while they scramble to pull back and consolidate their forces across the sector. Those little green MFers are now willing to trade away assets that are at risk of being taken by force in the Jeraptha offensive that is sure to follow.”

  Chotek was rubbing his temples, a sure sign he had a headache coming on. He was avoiding my eyes; that told me I was going to catch hell later. “Is there anything we can do to derail the negotiations at this point? Are they final?”

  “The acceptance is not formal yet; the Ruhar negotiation team needs to brief their federal government, and then the Jeraptha will need to sign off on the deal. But it is pretty much a done deal at this point; the Fire Dragons offered a valuable wormhole cluster that connects to three planets the Ruhar want badly.”

  “The Thuranin and Fire Dragons are willing to give up a wormhole cluster and three planets, in exchange for a ride to Earth?” I was incredulous. Planets are big things. Who the hell would trade even one planet for a road trip?

  “And back, Joe. A ride to Earth and back. These are three planets the Thuranin have told the Fire Dragons they will likely lose anyway, when the Jeraptha begin pushing the Thuranin back in that area. The Fire Dragons are hoping a delay of a civil war will position them well when the war does inevitably start, and they could take far more than three planets away from rival clans. The Thuranin and Fire Dragons are accepting reality and making the best deal they can get at this point. When you think about, this deal is win-win for everyone. Except you humans, of course, you are scuh-reeeewed, dude.”