Paradise
Book 3 of Expeditionary Force
By Craig Alanson
Text copyright © 2016 Craig Alanson
All Rights Reserved
Contact the author at [email protected]
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty One
Chapter Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Chapter Twenty Four
Chapter Twenty Five
Chapter Twenty Six
Chapter Twenty Seven
Chapter Twenty Eight
Prologue
Paradise
Three months after the original Merry Band of Pirates left Paradise
US Army Specialist Jesse ‘Cornpone’ Colter took a freshly cleaned pair of white cotton gloves out of a box, put them on, and adjusted the surgical facemask to completely cover his nose and mouth. Checking himself in a small mirror attached to a tree, he took a deep breath, reached down into the pen and carefully, very carefully picked up a small yellow fluffy thing. It was a chick, a baby chicken. On Paradise. A small miracle. Or, the chick was small, the miracle was great.
Jesse held the chick up to eye level, inspecting its feet. Everything looked fine, or it looked fine as much as Jesse knew about chickens. A month ago, what he knew about chickens was that they tasted good and produced eggs. Also that they weren’t bred to be smart.
Smart, ha! He thought as he set the chick back down in the clean straw of the pen. The chick had been brought to Paradise as a fertilized egg. Jesse had volunteered to fight in space against the enemies of humanity. Only their ‘allies’ turned out to be the real enemy, and the ‘enemy’ was a species that mostly wanted to ignore humans. Between him and the chicken, he asked himself, who was the dumb one?
The presence of Earth animals on Paradise had been UNEF’s most closely guarded secret. The last three Kristang ships to bring supplies from Earth had included chicken eggs, baby calves, baby pigs and baby goats. Not all of the young animals survived the long trip, and since the Ruhar fleet had firmly reestablished its hold on Paradise, no more animals would be coming from Earth. UNEF HQ had kept the presence of the animals a secret for two reasons. Until the survival of a significant population of Earth animals on Paradise could be established, UNEF didn’t want to get people’s hopes up that they would someday have fresh food other than fruits and vegetables. And perhaps equally important was that the presence of domesticated Earth animals on Paradise would signal that the Expeditionary Force would not be returning home for a long time, a very long time. That was even before the Ruhar took back Paradise and cut off UNEF’s only possibility of going home.
That fateful day when the Ruhar fleet took Paradise back from the Kristang, was more than three months gone by now. The first couple weeks had been chaotic; UNEF HQ quickly had ordered human forces across the planet to lay down their weapons, recognizing that rifles against starships was not a survivable fight for UNEF. Not all humans had complied with the surrender order; these people had come out to the stars to fight hamsters and they couldn’t mentally adapt to their changed situation. The fact is, there were hard feelings on both sides, and those feelings weren’t going away in a month, or a year, or maybe even a generation. After two or three weeks, the situation stabilized, and humans accepted that the renewed Ruhar presence in the sky wasn’t merely another raid. Those humans who still insisted on fighting the Ruhar ‘occupiers’ were dealt with by the Ruhar military, in some cases harshly and sometimes with a level of force wildly disproportionate to the threat. No one needed an orbital railgun strike to deal with three guys hiding out in the bush, but with the Ruhar completely in charge there was no one to appeal to for de-escalating the use of force. And hearing that the Ruhar had used a railgun against three guys who had limited ammo, almost no food and posed no real threat was a powerful message to the rest of UNEF. The message was heard loud and clear by all humans on Paradise; the Ruhar control the high ground. Do not mess with them.
Rumors were flying fast via the informal zPhone network. The Kristang fleet was gathering outside the Paradise system and would soon take back the planet. No, the Kristang had given up on Paradise; the raids were only a way to harass and distract the Ruhar. The Ruhar were negotiating to send humans back to Earth. No, humans were never going back to Earth. Humans were being recruited to fight with the Ruhar. No, the advanced Ruhar had no interest in working with weak, primitive human soldiers. Whatever you feared or wanted to believe, there was a rumor tailor made for you.
Jesse didn’t believe any of the rumors, other than that they were rumors. He believed what he knew, what he’d seen. Five weeks after the Ruhar took back the planet, Jesse and his fireteam buddy Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka had volunteered to move from a POW camp to a new UNEF farm on the southern continent of Paradise. The farm was informally being called ‘Fort Rakovsky’ after a US Army soldier who had died in the first Ruhar raid. Rumor had it, and this rumor Jesse thought might be true, that most humans would eventually be scattered in settlements across the southern continent that humans called ‘Lemuria’. That would keep them away from the bulk of the Ruhar civilian population, and isolated groups of humans would be easier and cheaper to control. Jesse didn’t need rumors to tell him that UNEF was never going home; the Ruhar were planning for humans to stay on Paradise long term. Rumors were nothing but uninformed BS nonsense; the Ruhar knew the truth. The fact that the Ruhar were making the effort to help UNEF set up farming villages, meant that the Ruhar knew their unwanted human guests were on Paradise to stay. Stay for a very long time. Or permanently.
One thing he knew for certain was that chickens taste good, Jesse told himself as he carefully reached into another section of the pen to pick up another precious chick. Each chick had its own section of the pen; they were far too valuable to risk young chickens damaging each other in fights. When the chicks grew old enough, they would be removed from the pens to roam free in a fenced field; ten chickens to a field. Ten chickens were a number large enough for the chickens not to feel isolated from each other, and few enough for an assigned group of soldiers to manage and protect. Although the native life on Paradise could not digest anything from Earth, that did not mean the native predators were not interested in killing what appeared to them to be tempting targets. Because most humans were not allowed by the Ruhar to have any weapons that could threaten the Ruhar, Jesse and the other chicken herders had to fend of predators with sharpened sticks. Fortunately, in his area of Lemuria, the largest predator was about the size of a fox on Earth. Jesse had only seen one of the foxlike animals once, and it had run back into the jungle when he had shouted and waved his spear at it. No chicken was going to be lost to a native predator at Fort Rakovsky, not on Jesse’s watch.
The most dangerous predators on Paradise were not native to the planet, and they walked on two legs. There were plenty of humans who would find it difficult to resist the temptation of a delicious frying-size chicken walking around. Despite the threat of severe penalties from UNEF, there had been incidents of chickens, pigs and goats being kill
ed and cooked up for a feast. Eating animals was strictly banned by UNEF. An animal on a plate could not create more animals, and the population of domesticated Earth animals was still too small to consider using them as a food source yet. And the Ruhar considered eating animals to be a barbaric practice that civilized, sentient beings would not do. As prisoners of war existing on the kindness of the Ruhar, UNEF could not afford to insult their hosts.
So there would not be anyone eating animals, despite all the time, expense and effort expended to bring domesticated food animals to Paradise. Chickens were used to produce eggs, which could be eaten. More accurately, chicken eggs would be eaten someday when there were enough chickens; that might happen within a year, perhaps longer. Cows and goats could be used to provide milk; milk that was supposed to be available soon.
Pigs were a problem. While Jesse had heard the old joke that you could use every part of a pig except for its squeal, the Ruhar didn’t allow any part of a pig to be used. UNEF was stuck raising and feeding pigs, without being able to get any benefit from the effort. And pigs consumed a lot of food that was needed by humans. Pigs would not be allowed to breed; once the current population aged and died, there would be no more pigs on Paradise.
“Hey, Ski,” Jesse asked, “what about this one?”
Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka set down the chick he had been handling, and walked over to look at the one Jesse was holding up. “That’s normal, I think,” he announced, looking at one slightly-bent toe on the chick’s left foot. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Y’all sure about that?” Jesse was worried about all the chicks he was responsible for. “It don’t look right.”
“Yeah,” Ski said reassuringly. “Come on, man, it’s a chicken. All it needs to do is walk around, eat grain and lay eggs.”
“If you say so,” Jesse set the chick back down in its straw bed, unconvinced. Ski was no expert on chickens; he had been selected for the coveted agricultural assignment because Ski’s grandparents in Wisconsin had raised chickens, and Ski had spent many summers on their farm. Jesse had been selected because Ski vouched for him. It bothered Jesse that Dave ‘Ski’ Czajka, who grew up in suburban Milwaukee, knew more about farming that Jesse Colter, who was born and raised in rural Arkansas. Jesse’s mother had grown tomatoes in a pot on the back porch, but that’s all the gardening experience he had as a child. His mother’s parents lived in downtown Oklahoma City, and his father’s parents were retired in Florida. Neither of those locations for visiting grandparents had offered opportunities for learning the science and art of agriculture. At the time, Jesse had been grateful to avoid the often back-breaking work of farming, that some of his friends had to help their families with. Now, he wished he had gained some farming experience before he joined the Army. Summers working at a retail store had not provided Jesse much useful knowledge of agriculture.
“Cornpone, we’re chicken herders, not veterinarians,” Ski laughed.
Chicken herder. Somehow, he had gone from carrying a rifle as a US Army Infantry Specialist, to being assigned to an Agricultural Development team. He had endured the jokes about chicken ranching with good natured humor; the job was important, and it came with perks. People working in agriculture were allowed an additional 800 calories per day above the standard ration. With UNEF cut off from Earth by the Ruhar fleet, humans were reduced to three sources of food. The dwindling amount of canned, irradiated and freeze-dried food from Earth. Nutrient mush provided by the Ruhar twice a day, although the Ruhar warned that those supplies were not endless. And whatever Earth crops they could grow on Paradise.
“Hey, speaking of cornpone,” Jesse nodded toward the field of corn to the south. “When y’all think that will be ready?”
Ski looked at the growing corn, scratched his head, then snorted in disgust at himself. Now he needed to get a freshly cleaned white cotton glove before he touched another chick. “There’s an old farmer’s saying ‘knee high by the Fourth of July’. You harvest corn when it’s about six, seven feet tall, or more. So, um,” he tried to judge the height of the corn plants. The agricultural experts in UNEF HQ thought corn would grow faster here than on Earth, because there were no pests to eat the corn on Paradise. No pests, so need for pesticides that might stunt the plants’ growth. “You know, I remember corn being way taller than knee height the first week of July, so maybe that expression is outdated. I don’t know. Another two months?”
“That’s real useful,” Cornpone scoffed.
“My grandparents grew soybeans, not corn. And this,” he pointed to the dark trees that grew thickly around the cleared fields, “is a jungle. Corn may grow faster here than in the Midwest. I don’t know.”
“Well, don’t tell anybody that you don’t know.”
“You’re afraid they’ll pull us off Ag duty, and we’ll lose our extra rations?” Ski asked. Even with the additional calories, he was hungry all the time. He did not like the idea of surviving on two bowls of Ruhar-provided nutrient mush every day.
“That, and, I’ve gotten attached to my chicks,” Jesse admitted. “They need me.”
“Those chicks need water to drink, grain to eat and air to breathe. They don’t need you.”
“They need me to sing to them, Ski. Helps them grow faster,” Jesse said, then launched into a rendition of an old Elvis classic. “Loooove me tender, love me sweet, all my dreams come-”
“Damn!” Ski covered his ears. Stupid! Now he needed to change both gloves. “Are you trying to kill the chicks? Your voice is bad enough to kill a full-size chicken. Or a cow.”
“Come on, now, it’s not that-, oh man, look out. Ship just jumped in.” He pointed to the sky and involuntarily cringed. Lights in the sky used to mean Kristang warships enforcing their hold on the planet, and protecting vulnerable UNEF troops on the ground. Or they meant unarmed Ruhar transport ships coming to haul away hamster evacuees who made the trip up the space elevator, and agricultural products that were shot into orbit by the Launcher.
Then, one fateful day, lights in the sky had meant a Ruhar raid; the raid where that lucky son of a bitch Joe Bishop became a hero by simply doing what any good soldier would have done. And later, lights in the sky were a full Ruhar battlegroup, coming back to take back control of the planet they called Gehtanu and that humans called Paradise. The lights on that day meant the Kristang were getting kicked off Paradise, and that UNEF troops had become prisoners of war.
Now, lights in the sky meant one of two possible things. Most of the time, twinkling lights in the sky were Ruhar warships patrolling the area to prevent a Kristang invasion. Some of the time, twinkling lights were Kristang ships jumping in to harass the Ruhar and raid the planet’s infrastructure. According to intel shared over the UNEF zPhone internet, the Ruhar thought the Kristang still had a half dozen ships in and around the Paradise system. These were Kristang ships that had been left there by the Thuranin, when those little green men decided they would no longer support the lizards’ effort to keep Paradise. The local Kristang force were ships that lacked the capability to travel to another star system or out to the local wormhole. Ships that were trapped, and crewed by desperate lizards. That was not a good combination. The raids had been a serious problem at first, causing the Ruhar planetary government to worry that the raids would encourage humans to rise up and rebel against their POW status. For the first two weeks of raids, the Ruhar had confined the humans to camps, while seeds went unplanted and crops in fields were not tended. That was a serious setback to human efforts to grow enough food to survive without assistance from the Ruhar. After two weeks, the raids had settled down to one every couple of weeks, and the Ruhar had cautiously relaxed restrictions on human movements.
The raids had become infrequent, more of an annoyance than a threat. With a mere one or two ships raiding an entire thinly-settled planet, any one site on the surface was relatively safe. Humans assumed at first that they were safe from attack by the Kristang, until that changed. Two months after UNEF surrendered to the
Ruhar, a Kristang frigate jumped in, fired weapons, and jumped away. A target of one of the frigate’ masers and missiles was a human warehouse; that warehouse became a smoking crater. Eleven percent of all human food on Paradise was lost when that warehouse was destroyed; and the Kristang had known they were targeting the human food supply. Before it jumped away, that frigate had broadcast a warning to UNEF; humans who surrendered to the Ruhar were considered traitors. Humans on Paradise had two options. Make futile gestures to resist the Ruhar and face slow, certain starvation. Or lay down their weapons, grow food, and live to possibly fight another day.
Which side humans would or even should fight on, was still a damned good question.
Jesse and Ski glanced over to the closest air raid shelter, near the western edge of the field. It was crude; a hole in the ground covered with logs and topped with dirt and grass. From orbit, it would look like any other part of the field, unless an enemy ship happened to be at an angle where it could look directly into the entrance. The shelter had been thrown together hastily and was not intended for regular or long-term use. The roof leaked; long roots of grass and shrubs reached down through the logs, which encouraged native bugs to take up residence. Because they were in a jungle, where every afternoon saw at least a brief thunderstorm sweep through, the floor of the shelter was a mud puddle. Last week, a work crew had installed a simple platform on the floor to keep occupants out of the ankle-deep water; Jesse was not confident the platform was still dry, as it had rained heavily the previous night.
“What do you think?” Ski asked, mentally counting off the seconds since they’d seen the light in the sky. They were supposed to get an air raid warning on their zPhones from Ruhar command; that didn’t always happen in time. Sometimes the Ruhar communications were jammed, sometimes were fooled by Kristang raiders being disguised as Ruhar civilian ships, and sometimes warnings simply did not get sent promptly. Generally, if you didn’t see maser beams, railguns or missiles coming down at you as burning streaks through the atmosphere within the first thirty seconds, you were most likely in the clear. Kristang ships didn’t hang around long during a raid; they popped into high orbit, fired weapons, and jumped back away before the Ruhar defenses could target them. That quick strike tactic didn’t always work; two weeks ago Jesse and Ski had seen a Kristang ship flare into hot white light, low on the northern horizon. That unlucky raider had been trapped by a damping field by a pair of Ruhar ships, and the brief firefight had favored the two hamster destroyers rather than the lizard frigate.
Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3) Page 1
