Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  The plan was for one dropship at a time to rendezvous with the grapple on the end of the cable, and be lowered almost to the surface. After each dropship was released, the cable would be retracted and await the next dropship. My dropship went first, because if my whole insane bird-on-a-wire trick didn’t work, I did not want two other teams to suffer for it. As it was, if the flimsy cable failed, the eighteen people aboard our dropship were likely going to die. Captain Renaud was confident he could fly us down safely if the cable got severed, but any sudden, frantic maneuvering would be broadcasting our presence to the Kristang sensor network. If that disaster struck us, Skippy was confident, somewhat confident, uh, smaybe fifty/fifty, that we could evade the Kristang for a while. Eventually, the Kristang would corner us, or we would run out of food. Either option wasn’t good. My plan, which Major Smythe grimly agreed with, was to proceed with the assault operation with my one dropship, if disaster struck.

  Hopefully, disaster would strike the Kristang instead. Disaster, in the form of the Merry Band of Pirates hitting them hard where and when they least expected it.

  I managed to keep silent as we slowly were lowered down to contact the atmosphere, then down, down, down through increasingly thick air. Skippy’s annoying programming restrictions prevented him from flying the dropship he was aboard, and Renaud’s reflexes were not close to being fast enough, so we relied on the Thuranin autopilot to keep us stable in the fickle winds.

  I remember my father taking me out to watch planes take off and land at Logan airport when we lived in Boston; it was a cheap way to entertain a young boy, and family money was especially tight back then. We lived in Boston the first six years of my life, then we moved to Maine; that is why my accent is all screwed up. People in Boston think I have a Down East accent, people in Maine think I sound like a townie from Boston. And I picked up some words and slang from the French Canadiens who are scattered all over northern Maine; that’s why people have trouble understanding me sometimes. Anyway, the first time I saw one of those giant double-decker Airbus A380s coming in across the water, it was moving so slowly against the clouds, I could not believe its wings had anything to do with keeping it in the air. I asked my father if there was an invisible string holding it up, and he told me yes. He said all pilots knew the secret about invisible strings; pilots told the public about fancy things like ‘aerodynamics’ because it made them sound cool. I totally believed my father. Hey, back then, I was five years old and I believed in Santa Claus. Now, my aircraft truly was hanging on the end of an invisible string, and the magical being I believed in was a beer can rather than Santa.

  The worst moment was when we dropped down through the upper edge of the planet’s jet stream. I questioned Skippy’s decision to send us through a river of air moving at 600 miles per hour, but he assured me the jet stream was steady and predictable, with calm air below it. I felt the dropship vibrating through my seat and the sensation made me queasy.

  But he was correct, or lucky, or both; we made it through the jet stream and the vibration dampened out. “See, Joe, trust the awesomeness.”

  “Right.” I couldn’t say any more, because my bladder was weak at the moment.

  Anyway, we reached our designated release point, fifteen hundred meters above the surface, in a remote area with rough, forbidding mountainous terrain all around. The release point was down in a canyon, so the dropship would be partly masked from sensors by the mountain peaks and ridges around us. Skippy waited until the engines spooled up to the point where they were holding us aloft by themselves, then he released the grapple from our hull. Renaud moved the dropship down and to the left, as the cable end gently sprung straight up.

  “Take us down, Pilot,” I ordered. “How is the cable, Skippy?”

  “A little dicey there right after release,” he admitted. “I know what to expect now, the next two times should be smoother. I do not anticipate any problems steering the grapple back up, Joe. Maneuvering and stealth capabilities of the grappling device are operating nominally.”

  “Great,” I breathed a shuddering sigh, and suddenly my bladder did not need my urgent attention. Hey, I’m good now, Joe, my bladder said to me, I’m just chilling, take your time. Traitorous internal organ. “Signal Major Smythe he can begin his rendezvous maneuver.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Major Smythe’s dropship coasted upward away from the planet, slowing rapidly as the gravity well’s pull bled off the dropship’s speed. “How are we doing?” Smythe leaned forward in the cockpit jumpseat and asked with uncharacteristic nervousness. In almost every mission be had been assigned, the part he found most difficult to deal with was what the planners called ‘ingress’; the flight inbound. The ingress, typically involving a flight aboard a terrain-hugging helicopter, or a high-altitude jump from a jet followed by opening a parachute at low altitude, was the part Smythe and his team had no control over. On every mission, Smythe had sat exactly as he was in the dropship; strapped into a seat with nothing to do and little control over his fate. A missile, or even a single lucky bullet could knock an aircraft out of the sky, and an entire SAS team could be lost without every firing a shot.

  He had been in many missions more nerve-wracking than the current drop. Helicopters flying at night at high altitude over mountains in Afghanistan, or flying in heavy weather. Here, the dropship’s flight was completely smooth, with no sense of motion. Why was he letting his nerves get the best of him?

  Because, he told himself, if he had failed during his missions on Earth, Britain would suffer a minor setback in foreign policy objectives. Or one group of terrorists would be replaced by another group of terrorists. If his current mission failed, humanity could lose their entire bloody home planet. The stakes were a bit higher.

  “We’re fine, Sir,” the pilot replied with a touch of annoyance in his voice. To assure there was no possibility of communications issues, the pilot assigned to Smythe’s dropship was a Royal Air Force officer. The pilot was immensely proud to be given the assignment, and he immensely wished Major Smythe of 22 SAS Regiment would watch a bloody in-flight movie and be quiet. Smythe and his SpecOps teams were razor-sharp warriors, but aboard Flight Captain Windsor’s dropship, they were no more than passengers. “This will be interesting, Reed,” Windsor muttered to his American copilot. “We’re twenty seconds from freefalling downward, and I don’t see the grapple on sensors.”

  “I’m not seeing the grapple, or the transponder field of the microwormhole,” she replied with increasing concern. The window to connect with the grapple was distressingly narrow; three seconds on either side of the target mark. The Kristang dropship was almost at the top of its unpowered arc, about to lose the last of its momentum and begin falling into the planet gravity well. The mathematics of orbital mechanics were brutally unforgiving of mistakes; if they missed the still-invisible grapple, the dropship would be free-falling toward the atmosphere. Pilots Windsor and Reed would need to use the barest minimum of thrust to fly around the curve of the planet rather than giving away their presence as a bright streak in the atmosphere, and their next opportunity to connect with the grapple would not occur for another nine hours. That would be another nine hours during which their Kristang dropship might be detected by the planet’s extensive sensor coverage. And it would delay the next phase of their crucial mission.

  The window for the grapple was not the only narrow margin they pilots faced. If the grapple missed for any reason, every second they delayed applying power to alter course meant they would need to apply more power later. The more thrust they needed to coax from the engines, the more likely it was their stealthed Condor would be detected. Sooner was definitely better if they missed the grapple; Windsor and Reed had agreed to wait five seconds after the grapple window closed, then they would activate the autopilot for the preprogrammed go-around maneuver. Going around after a missed approach was routine for pilots, but this time, Reed thought incredulously, they would have to go around an entire planet to make another a
pproach to the grapple.

  “Trust the awesomeness,” Windsor whispered.

  “What?” Reed tore her eyes away from the navigation console to glance at the pilot, eyes wide in questioning surprise.

  “We have to trust that dodgy beer can,” Windsor whispered. “If he fails, we’re buggered anyway.”

  Reed did not reply to Windsor’s remark, as she didn’t have time. “Begin window in four, three, two, one, mark.” The window for contact with the grapple only lasted six seconds. “One down, two down, three-”

  There was a soft clanging sound from the topside of the dropship, and the consoles lit up. “Contact,” Reed breathed softly. “Solid contact. We’re attached.” She held up her hands to show she was not touching any of the controls. “I never saw the transponder.”

  “It saw us, that’s the important part. We’re attached to the yoyo,” Windsor announced with a quick swing of his head in Smythe’s direction. “Enjoy the lift ride, we have a long way down.”

  “Dodgy I am, huh?” Skippy’s voice boomed over the cockpit speakers. “I caught you with the grapple within seven hundredths of a seconds from the target time. What do you think of that, you cheeky bugger?”

  Windsor managed a hearty laugh. “Mister Skippy, any time you can catch us on a yoyo string like that, you can call me any name you wish.”

  “Huh,” Skippy sniffed. “I guess you did say to trust my awesomeness, so I’ll give you points for that. Cable operation is nominal. The winds at ground level have picked up a bit, we may need to alter the landing zone. I’ll know in about eighty eight minutes.”

  “Nothing for us to do until then?” Smythe asked, relieved.

  “Isn’t this when you Brits typically have tea and crumpets?” Skippy asked in a teasing tone.

  “Right now,” Smythe squeezed his hands to control the last of their trembling, “I would prefer a gin and tonic, if you please. You can skip the tonic.”

  “We’re down,” Reed announced the obvious, as everyone aboard the dropship had felt the craft settle to the soil of the alien planet, and heard the engines spooling down. The ride down on the yoyo string had been even more smooth than the first dropship experienced; Skippy had more accurate data on the nanofiber cable and was able to anticipate and prevent vibrations from beginning. Winds at the surface required release from the grapple at a higher altitude than the first ship, so Reed had monitored the dropship’s stealth field and passive sensors. while Windsor flew them down using minimum power. There was a scary moment when a patrol of three Kristang aircraft flew toward them at high speed, but the patrol passed by seventy kilometers to the east and never detected anything unusual.

  “Two down, three to go,” Skippy announced with smug self-satisfaction. “Retracting the cable now. Damn, Joe, this is actually working. When you told me your monkey-brained idea to lower dropships to the surface on a yoyo string, I was looking forward to endless opportunities to tell you what a moron you are. But then I realized my disdain for this idea did not encompass one hugely important factor.”

  “Huh?” I was distracted by watching the symbols for the third, fourth and fifth dropships coasting toward their individual rendezvous with the grapple. There was a whole lot that could still go wrong with this phase of the operation. Anything could go wrong, and we couldn’t afford to have even one thing get screwed up. “What’s that?”

  “My incredible awesomeness, of course. I almost forgot that with Skippy the Magnificent, the impossible becomes ordinary.”

  “Uh huh. Hey, speaking of impossible things, is there any chance that you’ll stop bragging about yourself?”

  “Let’s not get crazy, Joe. I owe it to the universe to let people know about me, so they can bask in my awesomeness. Anyway, you had another typically idiotic idea, and I made it happen. Behold, the miracle that is me.”

  “It would be a miracle if he would shut up,” Lt. Williams muttered.

  I ignored Skippy while I watched the grapple retract, and the first of our three Kristang dropships losing speed as it coasted upward away from the planet’s gravity well. Each dropship followed a very precise course so that it would reach the top of its arc at the exact moment it was below the grapple. The speed and direction of the dropship at that point also needed to be exactly the same as the planet’s surface directly below. If the dropship missed the grapple, it would be falling toward the atmosphere, and would need to immediately execute a minimum-power go-around maneuver to swing entirely around the planet to try again. During its unplanned orbit, the dropship would be passing through multiple overlapping satellite and ground-based detection grids. Skippy had infiltrated the sensor networks of all the clans who maintained facilities on the surface, he still warned that there were so many networks sharing data, even he had difficulty fooling all the networks so that none of them detected conflicting sensor inputs.

  Once our second Thuranin dropship was down, we next had to get our three Kristang dropships to the surface. We needed the three Kristang dropships for the assault phase of the op; if the dropships were detected, we could not be seen flying around in a Thuranin craft, or that would blow the whole purpose of getting the lizard clans to fight each other. If the Kristang knew outsiders were interfering in clan relations, that would backfire on us by getting the clans to unite against a common enemy. So we would be using our modified Kristang dropships to conduct the attacks. Once the clans were fighting and it was time us to skedaddle out of there, we would not be risking our lives in anything but the best spacecraft available. The Thuranin dropships were faster, more stealthy, had far greater range and more practical for extended voyages. My plan was to ditch the Kristang ships, hopefully make them fly out to sea on autopilot before exploding. All three teams would then board the two Thuranin dropships. If everything went according to plan, we would use the yoyo string trick in reverse; hauling the dropships up above the atmosphere on a cable. Once each dropship reached maximum altitude, the grapple would be released and the dropship use its acquired momentum to fly off out of orbit, then activate engines at a safe distance. All that remained of the final phase of the mission would be for the two dropships to fly through hopefully empty space for three weeks, until a quick pre-planned rendezvous with the Dutchman.

  Anyway, we got all five dropships to the surface successfully. None of them were detected or damaged. The next item in the plan was for all five ships to fly to a location with better concealment. One of the Thuranin dropships took the lead, with the other one in the rear and the three Kristang birds strung out in between, like baby ducks following their mother. That flight took only three hours and a couple years off my life. We put up stealth netting over the five spacecraft, material which enhanced the stealth effect each bird projected with its own field. Then we settled down to wait out the daylight hours, huddled inside so our body heat did not pose any risk of leaking through the stealth effect.

  Once darkness fell, our first order of business was topping off the fuel tanks of the Kristang ships from the much larger Thuranin ships. The fuel each type of ship used was incompatible, of course, making logistics wonderfully more complicated. Then we checked out all five ships with a fine-toothed comb, an exercise Skippy insisted was a waste of time as he was already monitoring everything possible.

  Skippy’s awesomeness hacked into the civilian networks of our target city, the local home of the Fire Dragon clan. The city was called Kallandre, and it was a densely-packed urban nightmare to me. According to our Chinese crew, Kallandre reminded them of Shanghai, only bigger. The buildings were tall and glittering in the daylight; Kristang may be hateful MFers but they seemed to like showy architecture. I was impressed by most of the towers near the city center, which surrounded the local Fire Dragon leadership compound.

  My biggest surprise came when Skippy zoomed in to show us a typical street on the outer edge of the city. There were sleek-looking buses, big boxy trucks, and many rolling things that looked like shapeless blobs. “That is a Kristang car?” I was surp
rised. In my mind, the lizards flew around in aircraft. If I had ever thought of them having civilian ground vehicles, I imagined cool hovercraft, or some wild-ass Mad Max type truck. What I saw had skinny tires and was about the most uncool car I’d seen in a long time. The styling seemed to have been done by someone who could not afford a car, and hated those lizards who could buy them.

  “Yes, Joe. You expected flying cars? Those are impractical in an urban or semi-urban environment. Also, flying is energy-intensive for short journeys. What you are seeing is a typical privately-owned civilian vehicle on many Kristang planets.”

  “Oh man, my grandparents had a car like that. You know, I can’t even remember what it was, the damned thing was so instantly forgettable. It was originally my grandmother’s car, then my grandfather decided to use it commuting around the beltway near Boston; it was such a POS that he didn’t care whether he hit a giant pothole or someone smacked it in a parking lot. Other than the windows, I don’t think my grandfather ever washed it,” I laughed. “In a way, that car was a form of advanced stealth technology. The car was so boring, it was freakin’ invisible. If you were robbing a bank, it would be the perfect getaway car; you could just park it right in front of the bank, hide in it and the cops would drive right by. The car could be parked in front of witnesses and they would be like ‘I don’t know, officer, it was kind of a beige blob with wheels?’ The official police artist sketch of the car would be a blank sheet of paper. Seriously, I think the engineers who designed this thing were hired from a pharmaceutical company that made sleeping pills. It was the perfect crapcan for people who have totally given up on life. The workers on the assembly line who made it snuck that car out the side door when it was finished; they were too embarrassed that they had built such a soul-killing turdmobile.”