Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “Hmm,” Skippy mused. “When we get back to Earth, I will advise that car company not to hire you as their new director of marketing. I’m sensing you were not a big fan of that particular car, Joe?”

  “Oh, actually it was great in a way. My sister inherited it when she was a senior and I borrowed it once in a while. You could not get a speeding ticket in that thing; the cops could never believe it could go that fast, they figured their radar gun was busted. And, I think the cops felt sorry for anybody driving that hooptie piece of crap. I’ll tell you what; my father was thrilled about my sister driving that thing. As soon as one of her boyfriends sat in it, he could feel his balls shrinking. I wonder where that car is now?”

  “Most of it is sadly rusting away in a junkyard in Skowhegan,” Skippy stated.

  “What? Come on, Skippy, you’re bullshitting me. How could you know that?”

  “I just looked up the vehicle registration records.”

  “From here? We’re thousands of lightyears from Maine.”

  “I told you, I downloaded all available data that was stored in digital format before we left Earth. Duh. Easy-peasy, Joe. Your sister sold that car to a guy who intended to fix it up and sell it, but having that car around was depressing the other cars in his shop, so he junked it. The junkyard owner has not even bothered to strip it for parts, he just parked it and tried to forget about it.”

  “That should be easy.”

  “Uh oh, Joe. We gots potential trouble,” Skippy announced quietly in my zPhone earpiece.

  “Crap,” I almost slapped my forehead in frustration. I knew it could be serious because Skippy used poor grammar like ‘gots’. “What is it this time? Damn it, we just landed!”

  “There’s no danger to us,” he hurried to assure me. “Well, no immediate danger. No danger at all, really, unless you decide to do something stupid. Although, hmmm, I’m talking to you, so stupid is pretty much guaranteed.”

  “Thank you for the heartwarming vote of confidence, Skippy. What is the problem?”

  “Keepers, Joe. I just learned a shipment of eleven Keepers arrived at Kobamik six days ago. Two of them are already dead; they were used for hunting, as a demonstration of how humans can provide good sport. The other nine are scheduled to be auctioned to the highest bidders soon; to be used either for sport, or as curiosities, or cannon fodder in suicide missions.”

  “Oh, this is not good.”

  “Perhaps I should not have been flippant earlier, Joe. I can see this news distresses you. Would it help if I provided the names of the humans?”

  “No! No, that would make it worse- Wait. Do I know any of them? I asked, my stomach tied in knots.

  “You have not met any of them.”

  That made doing my job a bit easier. “Give me details of where these people are being held,” I didn’t want to know, but it was my job. He told me, and it wasn’t good. “Thanks, Skippy. I need to inform Chotek.”

  Chotek was in the other Thuranin dropship, being briefed by Major Smythe and his team leaders on the upcoming operation. Giraud was speaking when I came through the airlock door. Since Giraud and his team caught a strong dose of radiation from being too close when the Dutchman jumped to kill that Thuranin cruiser, the French paratroopers had been on light duty while they healed internally. He hadn’t said anything to me about it, but I knew the enforced idleness and being out of action was hurting the French worse than the radiation damage or Dr. Skippy’s treatment. Chotek held up a finger to halt Giraud, and looked at me. “Yes, Colonel?” The expression on my face must have alerted him to trouble.

  “Sir, we have a complication. Skippy discovered there are nine humans, from the Keeper faction, on the planet. They are going to be auctioned off within the week. There were eleven, but two have already been killed by the Kristang.”

  Chotek steepled his hands while he considered the news I dumped on him. At such times, I thought I could see a great weariness in him. He had signed up for a simple mission: to learn whether the Thuranin were sending another ship to Earth. I’m sure he thought his biggest responsibility would be preventing me from sending the ship on risky adventures. When he signed onto the mission, he might have expected all we needed to do was park the ship outside a Thuranin star system, and wait while Skippy listened to transmissions. As soon as Skippy heard the expected good news, we could fly the ship back to Earth, where Hans Chotek would receive accolades and congratulations and never have to see me or the Merry Band of Pirates again. Instead, we had to board and capture a Thuranin relay station. Then, rather than peacefully waiting to learn what the Thuranin planned to do, we flew off to rescue UNEF on Paradise. Chotek was no doubt irritated that he was being asked to make too many decisions. While Chotek stared at me and tapped his lips with the fingers, no one spoke. “Colonel, if you are proposing that we risk this crew and exposing our presence here, to rescue nine-”

  “No, Sir,” I interjected. “They are being held in a secure underground facility; I don’t see any practical way to pull them out. I, thought you should know.”

  Chotek looked to me, then at Giraud, then back at me. Rene Giraud and I were the only people on Kobamik who had served with UNEF on Paradise; we had the strongest ties to people there. Giraud spoke before Chotek could open his mouth. “The Keepers made their choice. If they do not like the result,” he shrugged, “it is their problem. Our mission is to protect Earth, we cannot risk the mission for nine misguided people.”

  Maybe the others thought it was not their place to speak, if Giraud and I both agreed we weren’t going to pull the Keeper’s asses out of the fire.

  “I would like information about this facility where the Keepers are being held,” Smythe finally spoke. “if circumstances change, and we have opportunity to rescue these people with minimum risk,” he didn’t need to finish the thought.

  Chotek sighed. “We may have a moral obligation to do what we can for the Keepers,” he said uncertainly. “My understanding is their continued loyalty to the Kristang, is based on the mistaken idea that the ‘Fortune Cookies’ received from Earth were faked by the Ruhar.”

  “Or they are just idiots,” I muttered. “I don’t know whether it matters what their motivation is. They’re humans, and we do have an obligation to them. If we could simply fly in and pick them up, Sir,” I looked at Chotek, “I would be arguing for a rescue mission.” I shook my head. “I don’t see it happening.”

  “A rescue also poses the risk of the Kristang asking who would want to rescue, or steal, humans,” Giraud warned. “It may be prestigious for a clan to own humans, but they surely cannot be considered so valuable they are worth stealing?”

  “No,” Skippy’s voice came through the dropship’s speakers. “Giraud is correct, any attempt to rescue humans would need to consider a cover story, or the Kristang would certainly become curious about who wanted lowly humans so badly.”

  Chotek looked at the clock on his tablet. “Major Smythe, you may investigate possibilities of a rescue, after our mission here is completely successfully. In the meantime, please continue with your briefing. Your team needs to launch in only a few hours.”

  The teams were prepared and in their dropships, I didn’t waste everyone’s time with a boring speech. We all had jobs to do, and we all knew the stakes were the survival of humanity. They didn’t need to hear anything from me.

  Skippy, however, had another idea. “As we embark on this difficult and dangerous quest, I have selected a medley of musical numbers that are appropriate for such a dramatic-”

  “Skippy!” I shouted. “Please! No freakin’ showtun-”

  “To dreeeeeeam, the impossible dreeeeeeam. To fight, the unbeeeetable foe-”

  “Oh, bollocks.” Major Smythe summed up what everyone was thinking, and we all cracked up. It was a breach of discipline, and it was totally worth it.

  “-to be willing to march into hell for that heavenly cause-”

  Knowing Skippy, there was nothing for us to do but let him finish, e
ven though his tuneless voice was like listening to someone strangle a cat. Skippy was an incredibly powerful Elder AI who could tear a hole in a star, but he could not sing worth a damn.

  “-and I’ll always dreeeeeam the impossible dreeeeeam. Yes, and I’ll reach the unreachable staaaaaaaar!”

  “Bravo! That was great, Skippy, thank you,” I clapped quickly, before he could launch into another tune in his planned medley.

  “Oh, thank you, Joe.” His avatar actually blushed slightly. “How about an encore?”

  “No! No, no, let’s, uh, all bask in the moment, Ok?”

  “Ok,” he said happily.

  “Question for you, though. You, uh, mentioned this is a difficult and dangerous quest. Do you think singing about an impossible dream is the best way to inspire us? How about we start with a merely improbable dream?”

  “Joey, Joey, Joey.” The avatar shook its head. “We have a troop of ignorant monkeys and an absent-minded beer can against an entire galaxy of hostile aliens. Impossible doesn’t begin to describe this quest.”

  “The beer can has a point,” Lt. Williams muttered. “Jesus. I never thought those words would come out of my mouth. Where did my life go wrong?”

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  Major Smythe stared, mesmerized, out the open back ramp of the Thuranin dropship. Below him the lights of Kallandre stretched out, a stark contrast to the almost lightless darkness of the surrounding countryside. To the north, west and south, the edges of the city were fairly well delineated by lights of roadways which formed a barrier between urban area and the hunting preserves. To the east, the city’s lights bled off more casually, with estates of the wealthy dotting the land all the way to the seacoast that was barely visible.

  In the artificial vision of Smythe’s helmet visor, important parts of the city were outlined in red or yellow; high-security areas to be avoided. From high above, the Kristang city did not look very much different from any bustling city on Earth; although Smythe had been surprised by the lack of skyscraper buildings. The tallest building was a residential tower of around fifty stories, and most of the city was covered in buildings of twenty or fewer floors. Surely with their technology the Kristang could build taller buildings; there must be some cultural reason why height was limited.

  They were flying at around thirteen thousand meters, the standard altitude for commercial air traffic in that zone of the planet, in order for the Condor to be disguised as an air transport. Skippy was hacking the local air traffic control system and military sensor networks, and the dropship was in full stealth mode while Skippy fed the Kristang sensors images of a civilian jet aircraft. There were issues neither the magic of Skippy nor the sophisticated Thuranin stealth field could completely mitigate; the disturbance of the air as the big dropship flew onward. According to Skippy, their greatest risk of detection was due to the dropship’s wake, which was noticeably more violent than that left by a commercial aircraft. Particularly during the brief time they had the back ramp open, passage of the dropship through the air left swirling patterns even Kristang sensors could detect. When Smythe tore his gaze away from the city below to look straight backwards, the nose of the second Thuranin Condor was no more than five meters behind the tail of the dropship he was riding. The dropships were flying in formation so the effect of the two being tucked nose to tail were like racing cars drafting; the two together formed a smoother, more aerodynamic shape, and helped disguise the fact that alien spacecraft were overflying a city controlled by the Fire Dragon clan.

  Smythe tapped a helmet control so the image fed to his suit by the dropship disappeared, and looked out on utter blackness. Inside the stealth field which bent light around the ship, no outside light was visible. He saw the lights of the dropship’s rear bay, the faint blinking navigation beacon on the nose of the dropship close behind, and his companions lined up with him to jump when their turns came. The absolute blackness was unnerving, he had jumped out of airplanes and helicopters at night and in clouds, and there was always something at least faintly visible beyond the aircraft. Not here. The navigation light on the trailing dropship blinked and the light was not reflected off anything around them, that light also was absorbed and bent in unnatural ways.

  He switched back to the artificial view and checked the time code in the upper right of his helmet visor. Twenty seconds remaining. “Robertson, are you ready?” He asked his companion.

  “Never better, Major.” The view Smythe had of Robertson’s face was also artificial as the faceplate was set to dull mat black for maximum stealth. “Can hardly wait.” In Smythe’s visor, Robertson was keyed up but grinning eagerly. Like Smythe, Robertson was wearing powered armor, and was burdened with a parachute, a stealth field generator in a backpack, and a Zinger antiaircraft missile. Robertson and Smythe would be the first to jump. The mission was to parachute down over an alien city and land on the roof of a building. Below them were thousands of heavily-armed Kristang warriors and clan security forces. Danger came not only from those lizards carrying weapons, for the thirty three million Kristang civilian men, women and children in Kallandre would instantly report the presence of humans, if Smythe and his SpecOps teams were noticed. A civilian did not need to know what a ‘human’ was to know such creatures had no business walking around unescorted in a Kristang city. Speed, stealth, their Kristang powered armor and the intervention of Skippy would all be needed to successfully complete the mission and get everyone out safely. Their friendly absent-minded beer can had to warn the teams of enemy positions and intentions, and prevent remote sensors from detecting strange aliens moving about the city.

  “Robertson,” Smythe chided his fellow SAS trooper for unseemly eagerness. “You realize we are about to jump with both feet into the heart of an enemy city, that is crawling with thousands, perhaps millions of genetically-enhanced superwarriors?”

  “Yes sir,” Robertson’s teeth flashed white in the artificial light. “Don’t worry, I’ll save one or two of them for you.”

  “That’s the proper attitude,” Smythe smiled back. An alarm chimed and Smythe reminded himself to relax rather than bracing for launch. Unlike during the spacedive on the heavy-gravity planet they called Jumbo, Smythe was not encased in an aeroshell, for he would not be burning down through an atmosphere at hypersonic speeds. Another alarm chimed, then a voice announced “Five, four, three, two, one-.”

  Smythe was propelled backwards, out and down in controlled fashion, falling feet first. He only had the briefest terrifying glimpse of the trailing dropship’s belly, then he plunged through and beyond the weirdness of the dropship’s light-bending stealth field, and again saw the lights of the city sprawled below his dangling feet. A featherweight nanofabric drogue parachute deployed and gradually slowed his progress, slowing him from commercial airliner cruise speed to a velocity provided only by gravity. As he slowed, the chute widened unseen above him and began automatically steering him toward his designated landing zone; an office building that was mostly unoccupied at that late hour. In Smythe’s visor, he saw the building’s roof outlined in vividly glowing green, the view from outside his personal stealth field provided by a probe protruding below one of his boots. Without the probe, he would be falling in utter darkness, having no idea where he was.

  “Eight thousand meters,” reported the suit’s computer in a voice Smythe had learned American pilots called Bitching Betty. He did not know whether Betty was an appropriate name, but ‘Bitching’ certainly described the digital assistant. Skippy had been asked multiple times to reprogram the Kristang computer, and he said he had made several attempts, but it continued to be annoying. Smythe suspected Skippy liked that the suit computer occasionally tormented the users. “Glide path is nominal,” the emotionless voice noted. In his visor, Smythe could see his projected glide path as a white line, and the planned descent course in blue. The white almost perfectly overlaid the blue. “Seven thousand meters.” Smythe tried to relax, scanning the target rooftop and surrounding area for t
hreats, using the suit’s own relatively impressive passive sensors and the feed Skippy was providing from the local security network. “Six thous-”

  “Hello, Major Smythe,” Skippy’s own voice interrupted. “How are you doing?”

  “Fine, brilliant,” Smythe was mildly alarmed by the tone of the alien AI’s voice. “What is wrong?”

  “Wrong? What makes you think anyth- Oh, forget it. Well, heh heh, this is a funny story-”

  “Funny to me?”

  “Uh, afterwards, maybe. Don’t all dangerous situations seem funny when you’re telling the story later? Instead of focusing on the threat, imagine you are sipping a pint in a pub back in Jolly Old England, telling amusing anecdotes about this little-”

  “What is wrong?” Smythe was completely focused. His visor wasn’t showing any threats.

  “Here’s the situation: a Kristang cadet, who is second son of a senior clan leader, has taken a fighter aircraft out for a joyride, and he is headed in your direction. He does not know you are there, of course, neither you nor Lt. Robertson have been detected.”

  “Why is this a problem, then?” Smythe hoped the young hotshot did not plan to land his fighter in the roof of the target building, and he zoomed in to inspect the roof more closely. That building had been chosen in part because it did not have significant obstructions that might impale the SAS troops or snag the parachutes, but also because that roof did not include a landing pad for aircraft.

  “Because his aircraft is flying aerobatics at high speed, just below your altitude. He will be approaching you in only a few seconds. The air traffic controllers are already ordering him to clear the area, but everyone knows his father’s position in the clan hierarchy allows the son to do pretty much whatever he wants.”

  “Understood. What can I do?”

  “You can’t do anything. I am telling you because I am about to release your parachute; it would be shredded by the turbulence of his jetwash. You will freefall through the turbulence, then I will activate your backup chute. There is not enough time to collapse and retract your main chute.”