Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Mr. Skippy,” General Ridge said, automatically looking at the speaker like I did although it made no difference. “You are threatening to lock us out of our ship?”

  “General Fudge,” Skippy made me wince when he said that, “two things. First, it is not your ship. You haven’t spilled any blood or risked your life up here, or survived for weeks on crappy Thuranin sludges. So, until you wear the paramecium-with-eyepatch badge on your uniform, you will never again refer to the Flying Dutchman as your anything.” He didn’t wait for answer. “Second, a threat is a statement of intention to perform a hostile act in the future. I have already done it, so the ‘threat’ phase of this incident is over.”

  My eyes opened about as wide as they could go, as General Ridge shot me an angry glare. “Skippy, General Ridge is-”

  “Yeah, yeah, he’s served with honor, blah blah blah, none of that means squat to me, Joe. Where was he when I was stuck on a dusty warehouse shelf? Where was he when we captured two starships? I don’t remember him spacediving with me and offering to risk burning up in a planet’s atmosphere so I could complete the mission. Enough with words. Only the cool kids can come aboard the Dutchman. Fudgy is not one of the cool kids.”

  Ridge didn’t get to be a general officer by being intimidated by words of any kind. “What I have been told is that you, Mr. Skippy, can’t maneuver any ship you are aboard. We have the capability to reach Earth orbit on our own. And our people up there should be capable of disabling the stealth field eventually. We can regain control of that ship.”

  “Sure, you flying monkeys can come up here. If I were you, I would be very careful to make damned sure this ship’s defensive weapons are not on automatic. It would be terrible if one of your crappy space capsules got shredded by a maser cannon.”

  “Skippy,” I said through clenched teeth, “that is not funny.”

  “I wasn’t joking, Joe. The crew up here could try to deactivate those weapons, but since you can’t communicate with them, there’s no way to be sure they were successful before you launch for orbit. And I know the crew here will do their best, but, darn these Thuranin controls are complicated. Best not to let monkeys screw with the controls, I’ll lock them out to be safe. There, that’s done.”

  General Ridge looked like he was about to bust a blood vessel. I spoke quickly, before he could say anything that Skippy might object to. “General,” I warned, “too often we think of Skippy as a lovably mischievous beer can. He is not. He is an ancient artificial intelligence who was created by a species that built the wormhole network. Sir, I have seen Skippy rip a hole in a star. He is not joking when he says that he will defend himself. We can not screw with him.”

  “Well said, Colonel Joe,” Skippy chuckled.” Now, General Fudge, you consider yourself to be a plain-spoken man, so let’s cut through the bullshit right now. You need the Flying Dutchman to go back out in order to verify there isn’t another Thuranin ship on its way to Earth. The Dutchman can’t fly without me, and I’m not helping the Merry Band of Pirates fly the ship unless I’m happy. So here is my very simple condition: Joe Bishop is captain of the ship. He is astonishingly stupid most of the time, but he has flashes of competence. Oh, one more condition, I guess; the French team brought a horribly stinky cheese up here with them last time. Ugh, I’m still got maintenance bots scrubbing the air filters near the galley. So, no more stinky cheeses. That’s it, I think. Now, Fudgy, you can continue talking if you want, but you’re wasting everyone’s time. And in this case, time is not money, it is lives. The lives of every human on Earth, who are at risk every day the Dutchman is not out there safeguarding your miserable planet.”

  Damn, I thought, that was a good speech. Of course, I didn’t say that, what I said was “Skippy, we all heard you loud and clear. You’ve made your point. Could you please take the Dutchman out of stealth, restore communications, and take the defensive weapons offline?”

  “For you, Joe? Certainly. Done.”

  In the end, Skippy got everything he asked for. Unfortunately, despite all of his amazing intelligence, he neglected to ask for the right freakin’ thing. UNEF grudgingly confirmed me as the captain of the Flying Dutchman, and restored my theater rank of colonel, again. That is what Skippy demanded.

  I was not, however, going to be commander of the mission. UNEF insisted on assigning a senior UN official from a neutral nation as overall commander. He was Austrian, and his name was Hans Chotek. Naturally, that is not what Skippy called him.

  “Oh, man, I screwed up big time!” Skippy lamented. “I’m sorry, Joe.”

  “What’s this guy like?” I had a briefing packet on Hans Chotek, but I hadn’t read it yet.

  “Well, Joe, he looks like a movie star.”

  Skippy’s praise surprised me. “That was a nice thing to say, Skip-”

  "If that movie star had gotten run over by the Ugly truck, and died several years ago. Whew. Are we really going to be stuck with Count Chocula for the whole mission?”

  “Count Chocula?” That made me laugh. “How did you get that name?”

  “’Count’ because his family traces back to royalty in Austria, and ‘Chotek’ sounds kind of like ‘chocolate’. Also, one of his ancestors made his fortune in chocolate. So-”

  “Oh, man. You didn’t tell him that you named him after an American children’s breakfast cereal, did you?”

  “First time I talked with him, yes. Of course I did, come on, Joe. You know me, no way could I pass up a golden opportunity like that. He had no idea what I meant at first, so I changed his official UN photo online to the Count. I’m sure he will get a good laugh at it, someday. He hasn’t been laughing so far.”

  “That means he did not find it amusing. Skippy, do you really think it is best to antagonize this guy right from the start? If we get off on the wrong foot-”

  “Joe, I want to get off on the wrong foot with this pompous jerk. I want him to know, crystal clear, right off the bat that I do not want him on our ship at all,” Skippy said, mixing metaphors liberally.

  “Our ship?”

  “Me, you, the Merry Band of Pirates. I’ll include Dr. Friedlander too, because he tells good jokes and it’s fun to mess with him.”

  “Not that you would do something like that to our rocket scientist.”

  “Not as far as Friedlander knows, Joe.”

  “Great. So we have a captain, and a commander, and we’ll get a crew. There is one thing that I need from you, Skippy.”

  “What is that?” He asked warily.

  “A promise that this time, we will be bringing the Dutchman back to Earth, before you go do your beaming up to the Collective thing.”

  “Oh. That’s easy. The answer is yes. Yes, we will. Joe, we can keep looking for comm nodes, because I need to know whether the two we have found are defective, or, uh, I hate to say this. Or the comm nodes work fine, but there is no longer a network for them to connect with. But I do not want to contact the Collective until we have answers for the strange and disturbing things that have been going on in this galaxy.”

  “Because you’re afraid of looking ignorant in front of the Collective?” I guessed.

  “Because I’m afraid of what I don’t know, Joe. More importantly, because I’m afraid that a lot of what I think I know, doesn’t match facts we have recently discovered. I can’t trust my own data, and that scares me.”

  Paradise

  General Nivelle, the current commander of UNEF on Paradise addressed deputy administrator Logellia in her office. “We are prisoners of war, and you are our captors. You have a responsibility to protect us from harm during our captivity,” Nivelle declared. The leadership post had recently rotated to the French after the Chinese, and Nivelle almost wished the rotation had skipped over him. It was a thankless and largely powerless position, from which the soldiers of UNEF expected him to produce miracles on a daily basis. The raids on human cropland by the Kristang were becoming a serious problem. Not only were humans dying directly by being caught in
the path of a maser beam, but the expected crop yield had now been reduced by seven percent. The next harvest was now anticipated to be just above the level required to supply humans with daily calories. There was no longer a safety margin for crop failures, rain and hail storms wiping out fields, transport disruptions, or anything else that surely would happen along the way. Most troubling was that the Kristang raids seemed to be growing worse, and the Ruhar were not doing anything about the raids. During the last two raids, the Kristang ship had been free to target human croplands for several minutes without the Ruhar taking any action. Humans were dying by maser fire, and soon would begin dying of malnutrition and starvation.

  “Legally, no, we do not,” responded the Burgermeister carefully. “The combatants in this war do not have the equivalent of your Geneva Convention,” she pronounced slowly so the translator software could catch up.

  Nivelle had expected that response, and was prepared for it. He noted that Ms. Logellia had pronounced ‘Geneva’ precisely, which told him she had practiced for this conversation. Good. Better for him to have this discussion with an alien who was at least informed about Earth customs. “I have studied the history of this seemingly endless conflict you are engaged in. You are correct that there is no formal signed treaty between your government and that of the Kristang. There is, however, an unspoken agreement that has been adhered to by both sides for hundreds of years. You treat Kristang prisoners as you would wish the Kristang would treat your people if they were captured; and the Kristang generally have done the same. Prisoners are provided food, shelter, medical care, regular opportunities to exercise, and are allowed limited communication with their families. You also regularly negotiate prisoner exchanges. There is in effect a de facto Geneva Convention agreement, whether it has been formally signed or not. We humans have not been provided food and shelter, we grow our own food and build our own shelters. Medical care is limited to what we can do with the extremely limited supplies we have left. And we have had no communication with Earth since you took this planet back.” Nivelle glanced out the window behind the Burgermeister, where a gunship fighter aircraft that humans called a ‘Chicken’ was taking off. A real window. In a real office, in a real building. Nivelle’s ad hoc UNEF HQ office in Lemuria was a partition in a tent, and he slept in a tent. The Ruhar had offered equipment, supplies and even a few workers to help construct a building. Nivelle

  and the UNEF commanders before him insisted the effort would be better directed to more important facilities for humans. Such as hospitals, air raid shelters, barracks for housing, barns for livestock and storing harvested food. Luxuries like offices could wait.

  One thing Nivelle had noticed as soon as he was invited into the Burgermeister’s office was the smell. Or lack of it. His own tent had a pervasive musty scent of dampness and mildew, despite the high-tech anti-mold chemicals provided by the Ruhar. The problem with the cluster of tents that served as UNEF’s temporary headquarters was that in the jungles of Lemuria, it rained every single afternoon. Sometimes it rained more than once a day. Human were not the only creatures struggling to adapt to the jungle; many Earth crops did not grow optimally in the hot, humid conditions. Ruhar scientists were working, when they had time and resources, to tweak the Earth plants’ genetics to grow better and yield more in the jungle. Nothing had been promised to UNEF about using the supremely advanced biological knowledge of the Ruhar, other than that they were doing what they could. Doing what they could, for free, for an enemy that had tried to eject them from their home planet.

  The southern portion of Lemuria was generally drier grasslands, and would likely be better suited to human habitation and Earth crops. Moving farther to the south was not an option, the Ruhar had declared, it was too far away from the support facilities of the northern continent. And because of high mountains that cut across Lemuria east to west at the southern end of the jungle, there were no roads to the southern grasslands. Humans needed to deal with the situation as best they could.

  They didn’t have a choice.

  “The situation,” the Burgermeister said quietly, “is complicated by the fact that you are being attacked by your own side, General Nivelle. When you came here to occupy our planet, the Kristang were your patrons and you were their client species. You were acting at the orders of the Kristang and with the support of the Kristang to remove my people from their home; this planet. That arrangement, that relationship, between humans and Kristang has not, to my knowledge, changed. Even under a de facto Geneva Convention, as you said,” the translator stumbled over ‘de facto’ but Nivelle understood, “we are not responsible for internal enemy affairs. Likewise, you do understand that if we did negotiate a prisoner exchange, we would not be responsible for the fate of you humans once you are back under Kristang control.”

  “We have not asked to be exchanged,” Nivelle said stiffly.

  “I would not recommend it,” the Burgermeister said with grave seriousness. “We have monitored the transmissions the Kristang directed at you. They consider you to be traitors. The Kristang deal harshly with those who they feel have betrayed them. Even among their own kind. With species they consider to be inferior,” she shook her head. “If you were turned over to them, they might execute all of you. Certainly they would execute you personally, and the top echelon of your command. And probably any female humans in a position of authority, you know now the Kristang philosophy on proper gender roles,” the female deputy administrator of the planet said with a grimace. “So when a Kristang ship raids this planet and kills humans, we must view the incident at least partially as a matter internal to the Kristang coalition.”

  “We have no option, then,” Nivelle said bitterly. “We can’t switch sides and join the Ruhar; our governments back on Earth have declared loyalty to the Kristang.”

  “That is not true,” the Burgermeister announced, shocking Nivelle. “There are many cases where one group of a species splits from its parent, and switches sides.”

  “I am surprised to hear this,” Nivelle stuttered. “How is this possible?”

  “It happens, over the course of a very long war,” the Burgermeister said with a human-like shrug. “For example, there is a group of Kristang who live on a planet that my people captured around four hundred of your years ago. These Kristang decided to stay, and repudiate their allegiance to the two clans they belonged to.”

  “This can’t be a common occurrence?” General Nivelle asked warily.

  “It was a special circumstance,” she admitted. “The Kristang on that planet had been isolated from the rest of their kind for many years. The planet was at the extreme end of the territory the Thuranin controlled, then the Jeraptha cut off the Thuranin’s access to a wormhole and the planet became isolated. We ignored the planet for over two centuries, merely monitoring it to assure the Kristang there did not pose a threat to us. By the time we besieged the planet, the Kristang there had drifted far from the cultural norm of their species. They declared that the Kristang had lost their souls to the Thuranin, that their true culture had been perverted by their patrons. These Kristang, who now call themselves the True Ones, are not entirely consumed by warfare. And they requested our assistance to return their females to their original genetic baseline. These True Ones could be considered neutrals, or as close to neutral as any sentient being is allowed to be in this galaxy,” she observed sadly. “Their industry provides material support to our war effort, and they have provided warriors to fight alongside Ruhar. The warriors of the True Ones are known for being absolutely fanatical in battle; they know that if any of them are captured by the Kristang they will be tortured and killed.”

  “I am not asking- I am asking a hypothetical question. You understand what a hypothetical question is?” Nivelle was not entirely confident in the translator. Eventually, he needed to learn more than a few words of Ruhar.

  The Burgermeister nodded silently, so the UNEF commander continued. “If we humans here on Paradise were to offer allegiance wit
h the Ruhar, would it be accepted? And what would that mean for my people? Here, and on Earth?”

  Baturnah Logellia paused to collect her thoughts. She could not tell the human commander that her own government was negotiating to trade away the planet, in the process screwing both the native Ruhar and the humans. “The decision to accept your allegiance would be far above my head. I could make a discrete inquiry; however, it would take several months at the very least. My confidence in our communications security is not sufficient for me to trust sending such a message via electronic means, no matter the level of encryption. Such a delicate matter would require me sending a courier to our home world.” Seeing Nivelle’s crestfallen look, she hastened to add “We have couriers traveling regularly; the next is scheduled to depart within two weeks.”

  “A discrete inquiry would be greatly appreciated, Madame Logellia. This is, of course, all hypothetical.”

  “Of course,” she smiled. “General, you should not discuss this with anyone, unless you are standing in a field, far from any electronic equipment. I do not think I am giving away any secret when I say that your own communications are entirely compromised, since your ‘zPhones’”, she used the human slang term, “use our satellite network. If the Kristang are able to intercept our satellite communications-”

  “Understood,” Nivelle said helplessly. There was no point in attempting to establish a separate human communications network; the Ruhar could easily breach even the best human encryption. Nivelle suspected the Ruhar had the capability to implant nanoscale spies directly into the hardware, so they wouldn’t even need to bother with decrypting signals. There was no point to complaining about something he could do nothing about.

  Earth

  It was great to have settled the question of whether I would be in command of the next mission, or even going at all. It was not great that UNEF Command wanted the ship to depart Earth orbit within seventeen days, and we had a tremendous amount of work to do before then. Major Simms, who had volunteered to go back out, needed to replenish our supplies. Skippy had to oversee manufacture of some key ship components that he hadn’t been able to make from moon dust on our last mission. He was given a blank check to use whatever manufacturing capability he needed on Earth. That was less useful that I expected, because Skippy told me human materials technology was so primitive, it was in many cases easier for him to create needed things from raw materials.