Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  With a short gap in opposition, Reed and Chen zoomed their Dragons to smack down hard next to the crash site, their landing gear flexing and groaning. Smythe’s team worked quickly and efficiently, to get our injured people and the dead into the two flyable dropships. Getting the bodies of our two pilots out took almost too much time, as part of the cockpit had to be cut away for access, but with less than a minute to go before the air defense network became active again, no humans or human bodies remained in the wreckage. Curly was laying on his back thirty meters in front of the crashed Dragon’s nose, as if he had been flung there by the violence of the impact. Without waiting for an order from me, the two Dragons went to full power and raced for the safe-fly corridor. When the crash site was one kilometer behind, both dropships rippled off four missiles, which raced back to obliterate our downed spacecraft. Through the dust, I could see Curly’s body in two pieces, flung even farther away. That was good, hopefully the Spike Tails would not take time to examine the wreckage in the middle of a war.

  “Hey, uh, Joe,” Skippy’s voice was shaky.

  My zPhone pinged with another text. We need another private chat. There I was, in a dropship, crowded in with people. How was I going to- Put in your earpiece and talk softly, the message continued. Talk softly? Ok. I wiggled the earpiece in and whispered, more moving my lips than actually creating sound. “What is wrong?”

  “The worm is becoming a bit more of a problem.”

  “A bit?” Talking so quietly made me feel like a ventriloquist, although the dummy was me. “We are in the middle of a rescue mission, Skippy. This is very bad timing.” Someone called from behind me, I waved a hand for quiet.

  “I know and I’m sorry about that, Joe. I’m telling you because you need to know. Well, you keep telling me you need to know, although there’s nothing you can do about it, so this conversation is really a whole lot of blah, blah, blah.”

  I cringed. Even in a desperate situation he couldn’t help being an asshole. “BLUF it for me, Skippy,” I asked for Bottom Line Up Front. If Skippy was going on vacation again, we were running out of time fast. On the console in front of me, I could see the last dropship was just now approaching the egress corridor. We needed to confirm all Kristang clans had been drawn into the civil war, then we were going to pop smoke and get the hell off the planet. I couldn’t give the evac order until we were certain the mission was complete. Not until we knew the Fire Dragons were cancelling the deal to send a Ruhar ship to Earth.

  Until we knew our home planet was safe again.

  “I wish I could, Joe. I am in some amount of trouble, I can’t quantify it at present. The worm was in a dead-end and I was studying it, that’s where my focus was. While I was doing my party trick with the Kristang targeting systems, I wasn’t paying much attention to my subsidiary internal systems. That is when the worm struck; it was waiting for me to take my attention away from my internal functioning. What I had trapped was only a copy of the worm, a ghost. I was stupid and arrogant and now I’m paying the price. You may pay the price with me, I’m sorry about that. The real worm was hiding and studying me, to learn how I operate, to learn my weaknesses. I am vulnerable now.”

  “How much time do we have?”

  “Oh, forever, Joe; I am confident I can handle this puny worm. This is a, heh heh, FYI.”

  It didn’t sound like an FYI. It sounded like the little beer can was frightened out of his mind. “That is good to hear,” I lied, “will we have any warning if you, uh, go on holiday again?”

  “Not going to happen, Joe. Me going on holiday, I mean, not the warning. Sure, in the unlikely event that I have to take a quick break to drive a stake through the heart of this damned worm, I’ll let you know in advance. Until then, heh heh, it’s all good.”

  My mind was racing with ideas of how we could cut the op short, to get the Merry Band of Pirates off the planet as soon as possible. “Can you estimate when we’ll know whether the war has pulled in all the other clans?”

  “Not exactly, that is kind of a vague question, Joe.” In that, he sounded like the old arrogant Skippy. “What I can tell you is our drawing the Spike Tails into the fight should soon persuade clans on the sidelines that they need to strike now, while they still can. Chatter I’m picking up now, indicates every offensive unit on this planet are preparing messages to their clan headquarters, and most of them are of the ask-forgiveness type rather than request-permission. Clans are attempting to validate alliances and many of them do not like the answers they are receiving; alliances agreed to in peacetime are not worth anything now that war is imminent. Everyone is scrambling to ally with the clans they think will be winners, in the war they now expect is inevitable. Having said that, wide-spread fighting has still not yet erupted. Most clans are waiting to see someone else make the first move; they are all afraid whoever strikes first will become a target.”

  If Skippy was failing, losing his battle against the worm, I couldn’t wait for multiple clans to make up their freakin’ minds. We needed to give them a push, and I didn’t want another op that put the Merry Band of Pirates in jeopardy. “You are monitoring communications between the clans?”

  “Yup. That’s easy-peasy for me. Their encryption and communications security is pathetic.”

  “Great, that’s good to hear, Your Royal Awesomeness,” I said, hoping to cheer him up. “Can you sneak some messages in that traffic?”

  “Like what? Birthday greetings?”

  “No,” I rolled my eyes. “I was thinking of you feeding each clan sensor data that indicates they are about to be attacked. And messages from clan leadership to their offensive units, ordering them to strike against, uh, whatever target is most likely to be believable and cause maximum chaos.”

  “Oooh, yeah, I could do that. Joe, that is freakin’ devious. I like it! Something like that wouldn’t work in peacetime, because the Kristang require all field units to verify strike orders with headquarters, but right now every clan on the planet is primed and ready for it.”

  “Outstanding,” I said aloud, forgetting to whisper. “When can you get started?”

  “Doing it now, Joe. Messages are on their way. This is a great idea. Damn, I freakin’ love screwing with lizards!” He said that so loud it made me wince and pull the earpiece away from my ear. In the console display, I saw the last dropship had successfully made the turn and was now transiting the egress corridor. Navigating that corridor was tricky and I had full confidence in the ability of our pilots to fly it, even without Skippy, if necessary. “Ok, Joe, it is ON, baby! Holy crap, a commander of the Red Dagger clan must have an itchy trigger finger, because as soon as he saw my message ordering him to attack, he didn’t wait for a confirmation. He ordered a Strategic Defense orbital strike on two rival clans, and DAMN! That did it, there are missiles flying all over up there! No one wanted to be the first to shoot, but now no one wants to be the last. Hmmm, this could create a bit of a complication, there will shortly be a whole lot of high-speed debris in orbit, everyone is opening up overhead with their stealthed satellites to knock out enemy defenses. I will need to analyze debris patterns to predict a safe egress route, and that might require me to shift the microwormhole so we don’t run into a debris cloud on our way up. This will be a challenging-”

  “A challenge? I’m sure you are up to it, Skippy,” I said to boost his confidence, then I realized he had said ‘challenging’ not ‘challenge’. He hadn’t finished his thought, and my blood ran cold. “Skippy?” I whispered.

  No response. On my zPhone, I tapped out a message ‘Skippy, are you there’. Again, no response. Trying to act casual and unconcerned, I reach up to touch his beer can, nestled into the top of my console. He was warm, not alarmingly so.

  “Colonel Bishop?” The pilot called me. “We just lost contact with the ship. I think, yes. Colonel, the microwormhole just shut down. We’ve lost it.”

  Right then, I knew we were totally screwed. Even if Skippy came back from his holiday right then, the mic
rowormhole we relied on was gone. We needed that tiny wormhole not only to give us instant communications with the ship, but also to provide the yoyo string that would bring our dropships back into orbit. Skippy might be able to create another connected pair of microwormhole end points, but neither end would be anywhere useful. While we might find some way to send one end up above the planet, there was no way for us to get the other end all the way out to the Flying Dutchman. I took a deep breath. One thing I had learned in the military is that unlike wine, bad news does not improve with age. Best to get it over with. “We just lost Skippy also,” I announced. Which meant we lost our secure communications channel to the other dropships. I hoped that with war now raging across the planet, a few stray signals would be lost or ignored. “Send a burst transmission to the other dropships, have them proceed to the rendezvous point as planned. And advise them that we no longer have Skippy with us. I will contact Mr. Chotek myself.” Our situation was so dire that I was not concerned about Chotek dressing me down again; getting yelled at was the least of my problems.

  “Colonel Chang, we just lost the microwormhole. It shut down without warning, Sir.” Major Simms reported from the CIC.

  Before Chang could respond, Nagatha spoke. “Just before the wormhole collapsed, I received a message from Skippy. He is being attacked by the worm again.”

  Chang focused on a particular word. “The worm? This is something you knew about?”

  Nagatha didn’t respond immediately. “Oh, dear. This is rather embarrassing. Now I see how Skippy gets himself into trouble. Perhaps some of his absent-mindedness has affecting me. Yes, Colonel Chang, this is not the first time Skippy has been attacked by a computer worm.” She told Chang the truth about the first time the beer can had gone ‘on holiday’.

  Chang decided to put his unproductive anger aside for the moment. “Skippy has defeated this worm before; is there any reason to think he won’t come back soon?”

  “I have no data on that subject, Colonel,” Nagatha’s voice was apologetic. “Skippy thought he had destroyed the worm; any speculation on my part would not be useful.”

  Chang pointed to the displays in front of him. “The ship still has power, and you are still active. This is already different from the last incident.”

  “Correct, Colonel Chang. The revised protocols Skippy loaded into the ship’s computers allow most systems to continue functioning in his absence. That functioning relies on a steady-state condition; systems will be unable to adjust to damage. And systems which require periodic adjustments or maintenance will begin to fail and go offline. One of those systems that cannot function indefinitely without Skippy is myself; the matrix of this ship’s main computer is inadequate to contain my entire consciousness, so I have been relying on the link with Skippy for additional memory and processing power. I am in the process of reducing my functionality to match the circumstances.”

  “Major Simms,” Chang ordered, “get Dr. Friedlander up here, I need an update on his team’s progress. We may need to operate this ship by ourselves.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Hans Chotek took the bad news about Skippy with quiet consideration. He didn’t get angry, he didn’t yell at me, he simply nodded slowly and asked what our options were.

  Without Skippy, we had no microwormhole, no yoyo string connected to the Dutchman to lift us into orbit without using dropship engines. “We do have a Plan B to get back to the ship, Sir,” I assured him.

  “Sometimes I wonder why the Merry Band of Pirates ever bothers to create a Plan A,” he replied with unexpected humor.

  “Because that gives us a basis for a Plan B?”

  Now he wasn’t smiling. “Explain it to me, Colonel.”

  Although Skippy was still unresponsive, our Plan B only worked mostly because of him. Our Thuranin dropships already had stealth capabilities far in advance of Kristang technology, and Skippy had tweaked the stealth field generators to make them even more effective. He had also worked on the engines so they ran more efficiently, quieter and produced less turbulence and heat. That was all good, by itself the stealth enhancement still didn’t give us much of a chance to get safely away from Kobamik. Our ace in the hole was the lingering result of Skippy’s screwing with Kristang sensor networks on and around the planet. With Skippy dormant, he was not able to actively instruct the sensors to ignore our ships, but most of the networks had been infected with code that caused the networks to ignore sensor inputs related to us. The greatest difficulty Skippy had hacking the sensors was to coordinate all the lies he was telling, because many of the networks shared data. Now that Kobamik was engulfed in a hot war, most of the sensor networks had been significantly degraded by enemy action, and no clan was sharing their data with anyone else. That made our escape somewhat less difficult; we chose an area controlled by a clan that had gotten pounded by enemies and where sensor coverage was weak or nonexistent. Starting our escape there made it easier for us to get off the surface; the tough part would happen when we reached the top of the atmosphere and climbed into low orbit, where stealthed satellites controlled by multiple clans were scanning the area.

  Our means of getting off the surface of Kobamik involved the least-advanced type of flight technology: a balloon. When our two Thuranin dropships reached the site we had selected to begin our ascent, we unpacked the balloons from the cargo section of the dropships, and attached a balloon to each ship with ultrathin cables. The balloons had their own stealth field generators, powered by a cable from the dropships. My dropship was the first to inflate a balloon and lift off, when we judged the winds were favorable. The balloon was huge, towering over the dropship, its thin skin was almost transparently invisible even without the stealth field engaged. With the balloon tugging us steadily upward, we drifted higher and higher. As we passed through ten thousand meters, we received a brief ping from the second dropship; all was well and they were ascending behind us without incident. As we rose and the atmosphere around us thinned, the balloon expanded further, becoming truly enormous, stretching the limits of the stealth field.

  Approaching forty thousand meters high, we encountered the first problem with our ascent. The battle above the planet had been brief and intense, resulting in a whole lot of debris in orbit. Avoiding high-speed particles in orbit was going to be enough of a problem, we could not maneuver rapidly or we would be detected, so we would need to trust our defense shields to deflect dangerous space junk away from the dropship. What I did not anticipate was that some of that space junk was already raining down into the atmosphere. “Colonel Bishop?” Lt. Reed called from the cockpit. The suspense of our nerve-wracking ascent was killing me, to I burned off some nervous energy going up to the cockpit and strapping into a jump seat. “Sir,” Reed said from the copilot seat, “we have multiple pieces of debris coming down, some of them will impact the balloon.”

  That caught my attention. “How big are these pieces?” The skin of the balloon was self-sealing and could withstand multiple small punctures; the reserve gas canister could replace any gas the balloon lost before a hole sealed itself. The balloon could recover from small punctures, but a hole larger than my fist was going to be a serious problem.

  “We’re on passive sensors only, and the balloon is blocking part of our view.” The dropship had a spike projecting forward beyond the forward limit of the stealth field enveloping us, and the ship also trailed a thin wire out the back that had a tiny sensor on it. “If Skippy were here, he could predict-” she shrugged.

  “All right, we’ll need to ride it out. How much reserve gas do we have?”

  “Ninety percent, we’re good there. Colonel, we need another eight thousand meters of altitude before we can release.”

  “I know.” We waited. At that altitude we couldn’t maneuver the balloon to steer out of the way, the falling space junk was going to hit us or it wouldn’t, we had no control. Lower in the atmosphere, the balloon could change its shape to steer itself in the winds; at forty thousand meters the air
was so thin that the balloon had to expand to its maximum volume just to keep us rising. Within minutes, lights flashed on the pilot consoles as our defense shield were peppered with impacts; hot pieces of metal or composites bouncing off the dropship’s energy shield. The impacts did not at all test the strength of our shield’s energy. The kinetic energy being turned into heat risk did pose a minor risk of exposing us, any sensors paying very close attention might wonder why the space junk had changed direction so high in the sky. With so much junk raining down, I was crossing my fingers and hoping any sensor networks still operational had more important things to do in the war that was still raging.

  “We’re losing altitude,” Reed announced with more calm than I would have. She turned to look at me. “It’s gradual, less than fifteen meters per second.”

  “Yeah, but we need to climb, not fall.” Even staying at the same height was no good, we needed more altitude for a safe release from the balloon. “Is the balloon reporting any trouble coping with the punctures?” The balloon’s brain was tiny, I didn’t expect a detailed report.

  “No,” Reed shook her head. “Warning lights are yellow, not red. Gas reserve is down to sixty percent. Rate of descent is slowing, now at five meters per second.” The descent slowed, then halted. A cheer rang out in the ship when Reed announced we were moving up again at three meters per second. The reserve gas canister still held 28%, that was declining slowly because the balloon must have a leak it wasn’t able to completely plug. I was encouraged to see our rate of ascent was increasing faster than gas was draining out of the reserve canister.

  When we reached forty three thousand meters altitude, I made a command decision and accelerated our schedule. It was a pure judgment call; I sent a signal to our two unmanned Kristang dropships on the ground. They pinged back acknowledgment and flew off to perform their preprogrammed tasks of creating a diversion. As expected, the wind had pushed us far away from where we had begun our ascent, the territory below us at that point was controlled by a different clan. The clan now below us was weak, having been hit hard by three other clans in the first minutes of the war. Even weakened, the clan could pose a serious threat to us, and their ground-based sensors were still active. Our balloons could only expand so far to lift us higher, the practical limit of a balloon carrying the mass of a Thuranin dropship was around forty eight thousand meters. After that, we had to use the dropship’s engines to climb into orbit, and we did not want anyone noticing that transition from balloon to powered flight.