“That’s not relevant, Skippy. At the time I made the decision to land on Newark, and risk aliens discovering us, I did not know that we would learn about the surveyor ship. UNEF is evaluating the decisions I made, based on the information available to me at the time. They are questioning my judgment, not our results.”
“What,” he sputtered. “You can’t separate the two! UNEF Command thinks you should have condemned our entire pirate crew to death, just to avoid taking even an entirely reasonable risk?”
“I wouldn’t have been condemning the crew to death, Skippy. You were already doing that.”
There was another of his signature pauses. “That hurt, Joe. How do you figure that? My rebuilding the ship out of moon dust saved the crew.”
“No. That was only temporary. After you rebuilt the ship and we left Newark, you and I talked about whether humans could fly the Dutchman by ourselves. You said it is impossible. The crew was going to die in cold and lonely space anyway, after you contacted the Collective and left us. Remember? I tried to make a bargain with you; to bring the ship back to Earth so the crew could land here safely. Then just the two of us could go out to contact the Collective. Based on what I knew at the time, the risk I took by landing on Newark only temporarily postponed the crew’s inevitable deaths. If I had decided against landing on Newark, it would have been because I figured we were all going to die soon anyway, as soon as we found a working comm node for you.”
There was another pause, longer this time. “Crap. I’m sorry, Joe. This is my fault?” He sounded genuinely remorseful.
“No,” I said quickly to reassure him. “No, Skippy. I was the commander; the decision was one hundred percent mine.”
“This isn’t a clear wrong or right issue,” Skippy’s voice reflected his frustration. “It’s purely a matter of judgment.”
“You are correct. And UNEF disagrees with the judgment I made.” From just the first day of debriefing, it was pretty clear that UNEF would not be entrusting me with commanding any future missions. Command of a mission from which we weren’t expected to return, yes. Command of a mission with a more complicated objective, no. UNEF didn’t trust my judgment. I was too young, too immature, too inexperienced, and too reckless in the opinion of UNEF. After fourteen hours of explaining over and over why I had risked the failure of the primary mission objective, I was beginning to question my own judgment. Maybe they were right. After all, I had flown the Dutchman right into an ambush. Later, a whole lot of things could have gone wrong on Newark. And the long road trip we took across the surface of Newark in our BarneyWeGo RV was for nothing; the comm node and AI we recovered were both useless.
Also, that RV sank, don’t forget that little detail. In UNEF Command’s view, that was yet another shining example of my genius leadership. Not.
The fact is, I actually got lucky when Skippy discovered the Thuranin planned to send a ship to Earth. In UNEF’s opinion, stopping that ship was the one good thing I did after we shut down the wormhole on our way outbound. Yes, in order for UNEF to not be completely disgusted with me, all I needed to do was simply save the freakin’ world.
Not that I’m bitter about it.
Skippy still tried to comfort me. “Hey, it was what we found on Newark that most convinced me to temporarily set aside my quest for contacting the Collective. So, landing on Newark is the whole reason I agreed to come back to Earth.”
“That, and the fact that as the commander, I ordered the ship to come back here.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he almost stuttered on the words. “That too. Joe, is there anything I can do to help you?”
“Jump that troopship back into Earth orbit?” I suggested hopefully.
“Anything other than that, I meant. You may not be flying monkeys like in the Wizard of Oz, but you will have to fly up there by yourselves if you want access to that ship. Or, hey, how about this? The troopship’s orbit is somewhat elliptical; I calculate that ship’s orbit will come within a million miles of Earth within the next six thousand years. If that helps.”
“Good night, Skippy.”
Skippy’s credibility, and by extension my own, had been severely damaged by revelations in my mission report. UNEF Command was disturbed and intrigued by what we had learned about Elder sites, about Newark and most importantly, about Skippy himself.
The first time we came to Earth, the story Skippy told UNEF was that he had been part of the Elder civilization. The information that Skippy had been able to give us more of less matched the limited info that UNEF had heard from other sources. An ancient species now known as the ‘Elders’ departed the galaxy long ago, and no one knew what happened to them. The Elders had created the wormhole network. Little was known about the Elders; scattered bits and pieces of their technology were highly prized by current species, although use of Elder technology had to be done very, very carefully. When the Rindhalu fought the Maxolhx in the original battle that began the endless war that still raged across the galaxy, both sides had used Elder devices as weapons. Use of destructive Elder technology had activated previously unknown machines now called ‘Sentinels’; these machines devastated both sides of the conflict equally. Devastated, as in scorched planets and scoured entire solar systems of life. Wherever the Sentinels struck, nothing lived, and nothing could stop them. After wiping out large areas of both Rindhalu and Maxolhx territory in mere days, the Sentinels had disappeared. They were still out there, waiting.
Now we knew that someone had used Elder technology to destroy a moon and push a planet out of orbit. Someone had done that after the Elders left the galaxy, and before the Rindhalu discovered electricity. Skippy admitted that he had no idea who had done such terrible things; as far as he knew there were no intelligent beings in the galaxy during the time between the Elders and the Rindhalu. The fact that Skippy was baffled called into question the accuracy and usefulness of his vast knowledge base. After Newark, Skippy was not even sure who he was.
Why, UNEF asked me, should we trust an alien AI who doesn’t know his own nature? Perhaps everything that Skippy thought he knew was wrong; we couldn’t trust his analysis even if UNEF trusted that shiny beer can’s intentions. And they didn’t.
I didn’t have a good answer for why we should trust Skippy, other than that he had helped us so far. His help had saved our planet, twice. And if we planned to take the Dutchman back out to verify there were no other starships on their way to Earth, we absolutely needed Skippy.
Even if he was an untrustworthy little beer can.
Paradise
The Kristang frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious suddenly appeared in orbit above Pradassis, the world called ‘Paradise’ by the traitorous humans and ‘Gehtanu’ by the dishonorable Ruhar. The ship did not bother to deploy a stealth field; the gamma ray burst of its jump in could not be masked, and the ship would not remain in the area long enough to play cat and mouse games with the Ruhar ships protecting the planet. Speed, not stealth, was the frigate’s ally that day. The frigate would attack the planet in order to harass the Ruhar defenders, and as soon as it was able, the frigate launched missiles and fired maser cannon at pre-selected targets on the surface. But its primary mission that day was to gather information, not merely to inflict minor if annoying damage.
The Glory’s captain paid only scant attention as all three of his missiles were intercepted and destroyed by the maser beams of the Ruhar ships before his weapons could cause any damage. No matter, the missiles had served their purpose of tying up the Ruhar defenders while the frigate scanned the surface and the space around Paradise. The attention of the frigate’s captain shifted rapidly between two displays; the first showed the incoming sensor data, indicating the scan was already 57% complete. The second display monitored the known Ruhar ships and predicted how soon the Glory would need to jump away. This second display the captain watched with a combination of anxiety and mistrust. The predictive ability of the computer behind that system was known to be right only 42% of the time
. The Kristang who built, designed and now maintained the system, based on concepts stolen from the Jeraptha, insisted that their system worked correctly. The problem, they said, was lack of data from the frigate’s inadequate sensors.
“Maser beam near miss, Captain,” the ship’s second in command reported. “Another. We were bracketed that time.”
The real problem, thought the Glory’s captain as he noted that the planned sensor sweep was now 71% complete, was the unforgiving math of physics. Sensor data crawled to the ship at the slow speed of light. Ruhar ships could jump faster than light. An enemy ship could appear on top of the Glory before the frigate even knew the defending ship existed. What saved raiding ships was their own ability to quickly jump away, and altitude. The Glory had jumped in high enough so that it could form an outbound jump point to escape, but low enough that the planet’s gravity well prevented defending Ruhar ships from jumping in accurately. Even a Ruhar ship with a well-calibrated jump drive, performing a relatively short jump, could only be assured of emerging within thirty thousand kilometers of the Glory. There was no way around the distortion of the gravity well, with the limited technology available to the Ruhar or Kristang. A separation of thirty thousand kilometers was far enough that the Glory could safely jump away, after its shields absorbed one or two direct hits from maser beams. More than two maser beams, or a single hit from a railgun or smart missile would burn through the frigate’s thin shields. Frigate captains were trained to jump in, shoot and jump away before enemy fire could find them.
The scan was now 84% complete; the Glory’s parameters for this mission had been a successful 75% scan. An additional 10% would allow the frigate’s crew bragging rights, without earning her captain a reprimand for needlessly endangering his precious ship.
Bravery to the point of foolhardiness was normally expected in Kristang captains, but not this time. There were only seven Kristang ships still around the Paradise system, and none of them could be risked without strong assurance that the risk was worth the potential gain. The small remaining task force was centered around one elderly cruiser, with its escorts of two support ships, three frigates and one destroyer. The task force had only two purposes; to force the Ruhar to maintain a substantial naval presence in the Pradassis system, and to gather intelligence. To provide intelligence that hopefully would convince the clan’s leadership that one strong push would take the planet back. The dishonorable Ruhar and their allies the Jeraptha may have decisively defeated the Kristang/Thuranin coalition forces in the sector for the moment, but even the triumphant Ruhar could not be strong everywhere at once. The planet Pradassis could still be retaken, but that possibility grew fainter every day.
The ship was rocked by a glancing blow from a maser beam; the Ruhar defense force had narrowed his location enough to begin using targeting sensors. The Glory had been maneuvering randomly since it jumped in, so that by the time a light-slow maser beam reached its intended target, the target was no longer there. Sensor scan now 87% complete. The shields had protected the ship from the maser beam, but that dissipated energy was now a cloud of high-energy particles surrounding the ship and degrading the effectiveness of the sensors. The Glory’s captain ordered a jump away, and the little frigate disappeared sixty one seconds after it jumped in. Jumping away, so soon after jumping in, rendered it impossible for the frigate’s jump drive to have any kind of accuracy but that did not matter. All the frigate’s crew cared about was getting away without emerging inside a planet or moon; anywhere else was safely empty space.
While the ship’s crew were preparing for a series of jumps back to the task force’s gathered ships, the Glory’s captain quickly skimmed through highlights of the sensor data. Strangely, the Ruhar did not appear to be putting any effort into stiffening their planet’s defenses against raiders. The Ruhar did not consider the planet important enough to expend the resources, or the Ruhar were now stretched so thin that they did not have the resources to deploy. Either circumstance was favorable to the Kristang.
There was something else interesting in the sensor data; substantial areas of the southern continent, mostly covered by jungle, had been cleared for crops. Human crops. There were large areas of fields growing plants suited to human biology. A closer look at the sensor data revealed newly constructed crude settlements populated by humans near the fields. And in the fields were Ruhar heavy equipment, assisting the humans with clearing the jungle, planting and harvesting crops. Despite being ordered to resist the Ruhar by their rightful patrons the Kristang, the traitorous, cowardly humans appeared to be wholeheartedly working with the Ruhar.
Those large fields, the Glory’s captain thought, would make tempting, easy targets for a raiding ship’s maser beams. The traitorous humans needed to be taught a lesson by true warriors.
CHAPTER TWO
Earth
After getting grilled by one group after another for four straight days, I wrangled permission to leave the base. Just me, no escort. I wasn’t under arrest, and although I still had the Big Red Button app on my zPhone that could activate the Dutchman’s weapons, it wasn’t necessary. Unlike last time, there was a skeleton crew aboard the ship. I didn’t need to be on duty 24/7 to protect the planet. Besides, we now knew there were no Kristang or Thuranin ships on this side of the local wormhole. So, I had the night off, all I needed to do was report back for another debriefing at 0800 the next morning. Friday morning. I was hoping they would let me have the weekend off. I was also certainly not betting on it.
“Hey, Joe. You think your week sucked,” Skippy said to me as I was changing into civilian clothes. “That was nothing compared to what I had to go through.”
“Oh, yeah, sorry, I meant to ask you about that. How did it go?” UNEF had some up with the astonishingly moronic idea for Skippy to be examined by psychologists and AI experts. UNEF’s thinking, if that word even applied, was there was something wrong with Skippy that made him act like such an immature asshole. I had told them no, there is nothing wrong with Skippy, he is simply and incredibly powerful, smart, amoral little beer can. Being an asshole was just his personality.
UNEF didn’t listen to me.
Fortunately, UNEF’s search for humans who were considered ‘experts’ in the field of artificial intelligence ended quickly, since humanity had not yet developed true AI. Asking a human to examine Skippy would be like asking a flatworm to look under the hood of a car and tell you why it won’t start. The few people working in the field of AI who were contacted by UNEF naturally would have given anything to speak with Skippy, but they all told UNEF that any knowledge transfer would be one-way. And Skippy refused to cooperate.
I expected that any psychologist would have told UNEF that they had no way to usefully examine the psyche of an alien artificial intelligence. I underestimated the arrogance of psychologists. Despite having exactly zero frame of reference for what constituted ‘normal’ behavior for an Elder AI, the psychologists plowed ignorantly ahead.
“It went better for me than for them,” Skippy chuckled. “You know what, the experience was actually mildly entertaining for a while, until I got bored with it. One of them had a nervous breakdown. Another one started crying and ended the conversation, he’s in therapy now.”
“Skippy! You didn’t have to do that.”
“Hey, you did warn them. It’s not my fault they ignored you. Morons.”
“Oh, boy.” I had warned them. Skippy knew just about everything there was to know about a person. And he was an expert at pushing people’s buttons. Whatever a person’s weakness or trigger points were, he would find them and use them. What the hell had they been thinking, trying to peel back the mind of such an immensely intelligent being? “Don’t do it again, please?”
“No problem, Joe, that little farce is over. Although they did conclude that whatever is ‘wrong’ with me is your fault.”
“What? How the hell do they figure that?”
“Well, reading from their preliminary report, they’re sayin
g ‘The alien AI is engaging in classic mirroring behavior with its companion Joseph Bishop. It is because of Bishop’s immature personality that the Skippy being’s behavior is-’ Ah, I don’t need to read the rest of this BS to you, Joe. The gist of it is that if a different person had discovered me in that dusty warehouse, a person the psychologists consider more mature, then I would be more serious and cooperative.”
“Oh.” Crap. Another reason for UNEF to be pissed at me. “They’re, uh, not right about that, are they?”
“Phhhhht!” Skippy made a raspberry sound. “Ha! No way, dude! I’ve told you before, me being an asshole is just me. That’s not going to change. Especially not because some bacteria with a degree in psychology says so.”
“Oh, good, then.”
A bus took me into town; all I wanted was a cheeseburger, a beer and time to myself. There was a crowd of reporters outside the base fence, all hoping to get an interview with anyone who had been on the Thuranin star carrier. In my civilian clothes, on an ordinary bus and with a baseball cap pulled down over my eyes, I sailed right through the reporters. Once I got off the bus, I wandered down some side streets; I wanted to find a place that wouldn’t be crowded with people from the base. Finally, I found a window that advertised ‘wine flights’ whatever that is, and I saw a group of people wearing suits go in. In my experience, this type of place was not likely to be crowded with off-duty soldiers.
It was about half full already. I found a spot at the bar, ordered a cold beer and a cheeseburger, and half watched a college basketball game on the TV. The cheeseburger was merely Ok; it may have been my mood that was the problem.
While I was taking a sip of beer, someone jostled me from behind and I almost spilled my drink. “Oh, sorry,” said a woman as she plunked her purse on the bar. “This place is crowded tonight.” She caught the bartender’s attention. “Lemon drop martini, please.”
Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3) Page 3
