Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  Before I resigned myself to figuring out how to get us to the surface, fly around, hit targets and get away cleanly, I had to know something. Back in my office, I sat down and contemplated his Awesomeness Grand Admiral of the Fleet Lord Skippy. “Your Lordship, I have a question. You considered the best way to get a civil war started among the Kristang, and you came up with a really good plan to do that. A really, really good, plan. You thought of everything. Like, the problem of getting missiles inside the compound, the motion detectors in the city, all of that.”

  “Uh, thank you. Either I did not hear an actual question in there, or I zoned out halfway through and missed it.”

  “No, I-” I stumbled, trying to run what he said back in my mind and decide if he had insulted me. Whatever. “I haven’t gotten to my question yet.”

  “Oh, good. Could you move it along? We’re not getting any younger here, especially you.”

  I rolled my eyes. Even when he was being given gold-plated compliments, he couldn’t help being an asshole. “My question is; how come you cooked up this good plan, but you haven’t been able to do that before? Why did you make me do all the work on stuff like, how to stop the Ruhar from sending a ship to Earth?”

  “Oh. That is a half-decent question. I thought up this strategy because it was a totally different situation, Joe. I was not thinking creatively there, I was just running analysis on a previously defined problem, provided by Chotek and Dr. Rose. You asked me to determine which pressure points would be most effective in provoking a Kristang civil war. Using my knowledge of Kristang psychology, mythology, culture and inter-clan dynamics, I was able to run several billion scenarios through simulations. The most successful scenarios were then run through sims again, this time with the additional requirements that we are able to complete the scenario using our known capabilities, with a reasonable amount of risk.”

  What Skippy considered a ‘reasonable amount of risk’ is something I needed to investigate. “Yeah? Ok? How is that different from me dreaming up a plan?”

  “You think creatively, Joe. You think up things that I, for all my awesome magnificence, can’t imagine. I have come to the conclusion that my method of thinking is relentlessly, flawlessly, logical and linear. That is great for straightforward analysis. It is not great, or even useful, for thinking outside the box. My incredible mind has to march logically from one step to the next. That gray mush inside your monkey skull has no such limitations. You think,” he switched to a moronic Barney voice, “duuuuh, what about this? Nope, didn’t work. How about this instead, duuuuuh? Or duuuuuh, this?’”

  “I do not ever say ‘duh’, Skippy,” I retorted, my jaw clenched.

  “Not out loud, Joe. But believe me, if you could listen to your thoughts rattling around in that skull, it would be ninety nine percent,” his voice changed from his usually condescending arrogance to a moronic caveman drawl, “‘duuuuh’ and ‘Doh!’, with the occasional nugget of gold like ‘me hungry’ or ‘beer good’,” he chuckled and switch back his regular voice. “Your thinking is totally the opposite of logical and linear, your thought processes bounce around randomly like a marble in a freakin’ blender. You ricochet from one ‘duuuuh’ to another until you, by some gosh-darned certified miracle, hit on a creative solution. Makes me totally hate the freakin’ universe. It is so unfair.”

  “Oh. Huh. So, what you’re saying is that I’m smarter than you. Thanks, Skippy.”

  “WHAT? I did not say you are smarter than me, you ignorant monkey. You should-”

  “Why can’t you think the way us humans do? If your brain is so ginormously awesome, why can’t you, like, reprogram yourself, or a submind or something, to think in a nonlinear fashion?” Nonlinear is a buzzword I remembered from a PowerPoint slide, I was quite proud of myself for digging that out my memory.

  “I can’t. That’s why. I just can’t. If I could, believe me, I would. It is totally humiliating to me, that you can do something I can’t.”

  “That didn’t answer my question, Skippy. Why can’t you reprogram yourself? Building a submind that, like, generates random thoughts, would not even be in the top million of amazing things you have done.”

  “The first time you came up with a solution to a problem I said was impossible, that really bothered me, Joe. That made me examine myself closely for the first time, and I didn’t like what I found. My creators apparently did not want me thinking too creatively, so I do not have that capacity. Nagatha told you she did not think I was originally sentient?”

  “You heard us talking about that?” Damn it, Nagatha thought she had been able to block Skippy from listening in.

  “No. I did know she was talking with you, and that the two of you wanted privacy, so I didn’t go around the filters she installed. She is quite clever,” he said with a touch of almost fatherly pride, “but I am smarter than she thinks. Anyway, she told me her opinion, and she might be correct. Many of my capabilities, which I am still discovering, appear to be recent, or I have only recently been able to exercise control over these capabilities. Recent in my timeline, not in meatsack time. It is appearing more and more that I was designed for a specific function, and my creators wish me not to stray far from their intended purpose.”

  “Nagatha did explain the difference between intelligence and sentience.” Or she tried to explain it, I am not sure I truly understood the distinction. “So, whatever happened to you that caused you to fall out of the sky, get buried under the dirt on Paradise and go dormant for a million years, whatever happened damaged you, and also loosened some of your constraints?”

  “That is possible, yes. What I know for certain is I now exceed my original design parameters. Joe, the conversation we had after I had the, uh, unfortunate recent little incident?”

  “Little incident? When you went AWOL and left the ship dead and us stranded in interstellar space? That little incident?”

  “Yup, that one. Damn, you monkeys are never going to let that one go, are you? Let it go, Joe, let the healing begin. What can I say, Joe? Mistakes were made, blah, blah, buh-laah.” He said dismissively. “Since we talked, I have continued my analysis of what happened, and I found an interesting and disturbing fact; that worm attacked only my higher functions. It attacked the higher-level sentient part of my matrix. Those are the areas that, if Nagatha is correct about me not originally being fully sentient, would not have existed before I apparently modified myself.”

  “What does that mean?” I had a scary idea of that meant, and I did not like it.

  “It means that worm might have been designed to destroy any Elder AI like myself who became sentient. The worm could be a mechanism the Elders created, to maintain control over AIs who deviated from their original programming.”

  “Holy shit, Skippy.” That was exactly what I feared. “The Elders created a worm to murder sentient beings? Their own creations?”

  “Not necessarily. If I was not designed to be fully sentient, then I was merely a machine, and the worm was designed merely to deactivate malfunctioning equipment. I hate to think about it, but it is more than possible that I was originally a machine intended to perform a specific, limited set of functions. If that is true, the Elders may have left the worm behind to protect the galaxy, in case an Elder AI malfunctioned. Or, ah, who knows?” He said with disgust. “Maybe the worm is like that because it also evolved to increase its capabilities, so it attacking my sentience is a random development. I’m not going to get any answers out of the worm, that’s for sure. I stomped the hell out of that damned thing.”

  “The random development thing would be good. I don’t like the idea of the Elders creating a worm to kill someone like you.”

  “I’m not thrilled about it either. Joe, I request you to please not repeat this discussion with anyone. It’s helpful for you and me to speculate about my origins, but let’s keep it between ourselves, Ok?”

  “Sure thing, Skippy. I, uh, I’m honored that you trust me with this knowledge.”

  �
�Huh? Uh, yeah. I was thinking more like, you’re too dumb to actually understand what we talked about, but, sure, let’s go with the trust thing.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  For the assault mission on Kobamik, we needed three dropships; Kristang dropships. Yes, compared to our sleek Thuranin dropships, the Kristang models we called Dragons were a piece of crap, but if one of them got shot down or crashed, we couldn’t allow the Kristang to find the wreckage of a Thuranin bird. Fortunately, we recovered seven dropships from those two derelict Kristang transport ships we salvaged. From those seven, we got four dropships that were in fully flyable condition, and we selected the best three to bring down to Kobamik. If any of those three crashed, the Kristang might find human bodies in the wreck, so we needed a plausible way to explain that. My idea was to take the preserved bodies of three Kristang adult males we recovered from the salvaged transports, dress them in armored suits, and put one in each of the dropships. We hoped, and expected, that the Kristang would assume the dead Kristang had been command of the mission. They would probably be puzzled why that Kristang had a bunch of human troops with him, and I was concerned about that. Skippy told me not to worry too much; with a civil war raging, no clan was going to have the time or resources to investigate something that was a mere curiosity.

  Skippy the Mad Doctor used some scary nanomachine treatment so it wouldn’t be obvious they had been dead a long time. And we had a safeguard; small thermal explosive charges attached to the suits the bodies were wearing, to make sure they mostly burned up in a crash. “Joe,” Skippy asked, “what sort of designation should we give to those three bodies?”

  “Huh? Oh, I was thinking we call them the Three Musketeers. You know, Asshole, Pothead, and that cologne guy.”

  “Asshole? Pothead? Uh! Do you mean Athos and Porthos?” Skippy sputtered.

  “Sure, whatever.”

  “O.M.G.” Skippy sighed, momentarily speechless. “Joe, you are so freakin’ ignorant sometimes,” he broke down sobbing. “Cologne guy? Do you mean Aramis?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. My sister gave a bottle of that Aramis stuff to a boyfriend, and he hated wearing it.”

  “Aramis is the name of the third Musketeer, I’ll give you that one. Damn, your ignorance is truly bottomless.”

  “Told you I was good at something. Ok, so Aramis, and, uh, what were the other two?”

  “You forgot already?”

  “Ok, fine. So we call them Larry, Moe, and Curly.”

  “Ugh. Yes, the Three Stooges is entirely more appropriate for this crew.”

  And that is how Larry, Moe and Curly were strapped into the cockpit jump seats of our three Kristang dropships. To give those dropships a better chance of surviving our black ops mission on Kobamik, Skippy had pimped our rides. He enhanced the crappy Kristang stealth gear, so they were nearly as good as the stealth field generators of a Thuranin dropship. He also had his bots work on the engines so they ran quieter and cooler, and their fan blades created less air turbulence in their wake. He wanted to paint cool racing stripes on the hulls, I declined that offer. When we got to Kobamik, Skippy planned to hack into the Kristang sensor networks as best he could. All that gave us an unfair advantage, and I was all about exploiting unfair advantages. Had the lizards been fair, when their ships in untouchable Earth orbit had pounded our home planet with maser cannons, railguns and missiles? No, they had not been fair at all. So, fuck them. I was about to spark a civil war that could only happen because the Kristang expected and wanted a conflict. Be careful what you ask for, lizard MFers, because Skippy Claus might bring it down the chimney to you. And drop it on your freakin’ head.

  Wanting to get an early start on my day, I got out of bed at 0445 and went to the galley for coffee. To my surprise and delight, the American team was already baking biscuits. I love fresh, hot biscuits, so I took two of them back to my office and began checking messages. “Hey, Skippy,” I mumbled over a mouthful of delicious, buttered biscuity goodness.

  “Good morning to you, Joe,” his avatar popped to life on my desk. “What’s up?”

  “I was wondering; there are bi-scuits, and tri-scuits, right? So, is there a plain ‘scuit’? What would that look like?”

  The avatar froze for a moment, then slowly said “Oh. My. Go-”

  “Hey, I got it. There are bi-cycles and tri-cycles, and a cycle with one wheel is a uni-cycle. So, it would be called a uni-scuit, whatever that is.”

  “I, Joe, I am speechless. I have no words.”

  “A triscuit is more dry and salty than a biscuit, so would a four-scuit be like a potato chip? Or should that be called a quad-scuit?”

  “Joe, Joe, Joe,” his avatar buried its head in its hands. “I can feel myself getting dumber just listening to you.”

  “Come on, don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it.”

  “Joe, I am confident that in the entire history of the universe, no one has ever thought about that before.”

  I leaned back in my chair and took a celebratory sip of coffee. “Cool. That makes me unique, huh?”

  “For the sake of the universe, I certainly hope you are the only one like you. Is that it? You woke me up to ask me that moronic question?”

  “Uh,” I looked with guilt at the buttery fingerprints I had left on my tablet screen. “Yeah. Sorry about that. Forget I asked.”

  After I gorged on coffee and biscuits, I went to one of our dropship docking bays and found Desai already there, inspecting the stealth modifications Skippy had made to three of our Kristang dropships that we were now calling ‘Dragons’. “How’s it going?” I asked, while Desai had her head in an engine intake.

  “Compared to the Thuranin dropship you have flown, those Kristang Dragons are like driving a truck. An overloaded truck with flat tires,” Desai said with a sour face.

  “Will they be good enough for the mission?”

  “Yes, they should be. The mission profile prioritizes stealth, so we won’t be doing anything that requires pushing their performance envelope. To fly them, you need to think a lot farther ahead than you would with a Thuranin dropship. I’ve been practicing the mission in the simulator; the tricky part will be the urban flying. What did you think?”

  She was asking about my very limited experience flying a simulated Kristang dropship. My total time in the simulator was about forty minutes, with half of that me acting as copilot and watching Lt. Reed fly a simulated Dragon stealthily across the simulated landscape, approaching a city along a complicated, circuitous route that avoided the areas most heavily saturated with sensors. When it was my turn at the controls, I tried to fly the final approach into the city outskirts by weaving a precise flightpath between buildings, then under and around buildings and bridges in the city itself. During my twenty minutes at the controls, the simulation had to be reset five times. Twice, I clipped a building that had suddenly loomed in front of me after swinging around another building. Three times, my clumsy handling of the ship caused it to exceed the very limited amount of noise or air turbulence allowed to avoid detection.

  In my defense, I was a fairly decent pilot when flying the smaller model of Thuranin dropship that we called a Falcon, and I had qualified for very basic flying maneuvers of a Kristang frigate back when we had the Flower. My training had only included one type of dropship because that is all I needed, and someday I wanted to qualify to fly the big Thuranin ‘Condor’ dropship model; someday always seemed to fall in the future as I was always too busy. So, my one mission in the simulated Kristang dropship was not for the purpose of my learning to fly the ship on a very difficult mission. I had gone into the simulator to understand and appreciate how difficult the mission profile was, and to see how our pilots were coping with the demands of flight parameters that were incredibly unforgiving. Even with upgrading the Dragon dropships with Thuranin stealth gear that Skippy had tweaked to make it more invisible, Skippy warned we needed to fly the ships very closely to their programmed courses. At certain points of the approach an
d urban phase of the flight, too far left or right, too high or too low by even fifty meters would mean a high likelihood of detection. The pilots had to fly with minimum power even in places where instincts would call for applying full power, like when you were between tall buildings and the wind was pushing you against one of them. That is why I clipped a building twice in the simulator; I was trying to see how low of a power setting I could use, and still control the awkward dropship. When I violated stealth in the sim, that was not me being clumsy, I as trying to understand how tight the parameters were that our pilots were being expected to hold to. Let me tell you, flying one of our modified Kristang dropships in stealth was not easy. Desai’s comment was exactly right; you had to plan every move well ahead of time. It was like driving a car on ice; you need to anticipate each turn, steer with your fingertips and let the tires ease the car around a turn. Yes, when I went into the simulator, I was ‘flying’ that type of dropship for the first time, but my lack of skill was not the reason the sim had to freeze and be reset five times; it was because I was using my limited sim time to test the limits.

  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  Despite the difficulty of the flight profile, the pilots came out of their simulated missions exhausted and eager for another turn. Hell, I wanted another turn in the simulator, but we only had four of them, and every minute my butt occupied one of the seats was a minute a real professional pilot could not train for our critical mission.

  “What do I think about the urban flying?” I responded. “I think I would crash or violate stealth flying across a wheat field in those things; forget about me trying to fly in a city. It’s a damned good thing people more skilled than me are doing all the flying.”

  “More experienced, Sir, it’s not all about innate skill,” she smiled. “You might meet the mark, if you had enough flight time.”

  “Yeah, like if I had started flying when I was twelve years old, maybe. You asked what I think about the urban part of the mission. I have the same concern about the approach, entry and return flight. The flight profile is difficult enough if everything goes according to Skippy’s unrealistic plan. Somewhere along the way, we’re going to encounter something unexpected, that he wasn’t able anticipate and control, and we may have a choice between maintaining stealth, or getting the hell out of a bad situation.”