Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Can you enhance the stealth of a dropship,” Chang asked, “to get us close enough without being detected?”

  “I can enhance a dropship’s standard stealth capability, but not enough,” Skippy replied. “Considering how close we need to get to a Thuranin warship, and how long we have to remain there, we will be detected. Joe, before you suggest we could do another spacedive, that won’t work this time. The only way to find the right ship is to wait near a wormhole, we could be waiting there for a month or more until I identify a ship that is a good candidate for us. After a month in a spacesuit, you would die of your own smell. Also you would run out of oxygen and water.”

  Avoiding another spacedive was a relief to me. “Hiding the dropship in a comet won’t work this time either, right?”

  “No, Joe, a Thuranin warship would never allow a navigation hazard like a comet near a wormhole. And a comet hanging near a wormhole in deep interstellar space would be awfully suspicious. Most likely the Thuranin would use a comet for target practice and blow it up.”

  “Scratch that idea. All right, Skippy, you’ve told us all the ideas that won’t work, what ideas do you have for us to do this?”

  “My idea is to tell you monkeys to think up an idea. Because I got nothing, Joe. I do not see how we can get close enough to a Thuranin warship, long enough for me to do the job, without being detected. We have seen that your monkey brains have a certain cleverness that has proven useful. So, do your thing, monkeys. Dream something up.”

  The frown on my face matched those around the conference table. Then my frown deepened when I realized everyone was looking toward me. “Hey, right now, I got nothing,” I held up my hands defensively.

  “We will, as you Americans say,” Chang said with a smile, “put our thinking caps on.”

  Chang led us through a brainstorming session for the next two hours. We threw out all kinds of crazy, impractical ideas, and Skippy shot them all down. I even mentioned ideas that I knew would not work, in the hope of sparking a good idea from someone else.

  We suggested using more than one dropship; one creating a distraction while the other got close enough for Skippy to contact the ship’s computer. Skippy said the Thuranin would either detect both dropships and shoot first, or more likely jump away if they thought our dropships were a threat.

  We thought of somehow getting Skippy into a container that would be loaded aboard a Thuranin warship, then he could somehow cause the container to be ejected later. I hated the idea of Skippy being out there on his own. And we would first have to find just the right ship first. Plus, how would we get a package aboard a Thuranin warship? Hide Skippy inside a birthday cake to be delivered by FedEx? You can see our ideas were getting pretty desperate and silly by that point.

  After two hours of us throwing out ideas ranging from wildly crazy to merely impractical, Chotek decided we should take a break. Our new mission commander gave me the impression that he was disappointed I hadn’t already dreamed up an idea. Truthfully, I was disappointed in myself. And Skippy. Maybe there simply was not any way to sneak up on a Thuranin warship, since they had been, you know, carefully designed to detect anyone and anything in their vicinity. Duh.

  We all went to the galley for much-needed refreshments. The Indian team was preparing lunch that would be ready in a couple hours; whatever sauce they had simmering on the stove was making me hungry. I got a cup of black coffee and stood staring at my cup, hoping for inspiration.

  The cup just sat there in my hand, looking stupid and unhelpful.

  “Hey,” Chang said with dismay, “what is this?”

  He was pointing to a bowl marked ‘Sugar’. When he took the lid off, instead of sugar there were yellow packets of some sugar substitute.

  “Sugar is over here, sir,” Adams said, pointing to a bowl that did not have any marking on it.

  “The bowl marked ‘Sugar’ doesn’t have sugar in it, and the sugar bowl isn’t marked?” Chang laughed sarcastically. “Why isn’t the sugar in the bowl-”

  Holy shit.

  I gasped with shock, and everyone looked at me. “Colonel Chang,” I interrupted him. “Could we be overthinking this?”

  Chang looked surprised. Confused at my question, he pointed to the two bowls. “It seems pretty simple to me.”

  “No, I’m not talking about the sugar. What I mean is, could we be overthinking how to approach a Thuranin warship?” Turning to Chotek who was spooning loose tea leaves into a small silver basket thing, I asked “So what if the Thuranin see our dropship?”

  Chotek wasn’t any more clued in to the idea in my head than Chang had been. “Colonel Bishop,” Chotek began in the tone of voice people use when speaking to a small child, “you are proposing to deliberately reveal our presence to the Thuranin?”

  “Not exactly, sir.” And I explained my idea.

  Paradise

  Cornpone looked up from pulling native Paradise weeds out of the soil of their personal vegetable garden. The weeds not only choked out Earth crops because native plants grew faster in the conditions and sunlight spectrum on Paradise, they also encouraged grow of native soil microorganisms that were not helpful to Earth plants. In order for Earth seeds to grow in the dirt on Paradise, the dirt first needed to be prepared with a soil conditioning mix that allowed the roots of Earth plants to extract nutrients from the dirt. It was the still limited availability of soil conditioner, not seeds, that was the constraint on how much crops could be grown by UNEF. Since he had volunteered for an Ag team with Dave Czajka, Jesse Colter had learned far more than he thought there was to learn about growing plants, and seeds and composting. More than he had ever wanted to learn. Being a farmer on an alien planet was a lot more complicated than sticking seeds in the ground and praying for rain. In the jungles of Lemuria, it rained every day, so getting enough rain was not a problem.

  Cornpone pushed himself to stand up, and tilted his head. “Hey, Ski. You hear that?”

  “What?” Dave asked, while pinching buds off a tomato plant, so the other buds would grow larger tomatoes.

  “Aircraft. More than one.” Jesse declared. He checked his zPhone. There were no alert messages, and no UNEF brass were scheduled to visit the hick town of Fort Rakovsky. Whenever high-ranking officers were in the area, people always received a warning from their fellow soldiers. UNEF brass, even the multi-star generals, rarely travelled by air anyway; they were limited to Hamvees unless the Ruhar provided aircraft for a very special occasion.

  Dave stood up, brushing dirt off his knees. In the relative cool of the jungle morning, he was wearing shorts to avoid grinding down the knees of his long pants. The shorts had previously been long pants that had been sacrificed to become shorts and work gloves, when the knees had worn through so badly that Dave had been unable to patch them one more time. “Yeah, I hear them now. Not dropships.”

  “No,” Jesse agreed. Dropship engines, which somewhat struggled in atmospheres, had a distinctive whine unless they were in stealth mode. “Maybe they’re delivering that pizza we ordered five months ago?”

  Dave laughed. “If that’s true, then that pizza is guaranteed free!”

  “And no freakin’ tip for the driver,” Jesse grinned. “I’m feeling generous; you can eat that five month old pizza all by yourself. Getting louder. They can’t be coming here? Can they?”

  Dave looked around the glamorous expanse of Fort Rakovsky. “For what? Did somebody here grow a prize winning tomato?”

  “Not that I know of,” Jesse shrugged. “And we don’t have a critical medical case.” The Ruhar sometimes took care of medical cases that the very limited human medical facilities could not handle. Sometimes. Back when humans were working for the Kristang to push the Ruhar off the planet, the Ruhar had provided advanced medical care as a way to sow dissention between humans and their lizard patrons. That tactic had worked; with the Ruhar going so far as to regrow the limbs of severely wounded humans, while the Kristang refused to provide any advanced medical care to their h
uman clients. Even after the failed Ruhar raid in which Joe Bishop had shot down two Ruhar transport dropships, the Ruhar had continued to provide advanced medical care to humans.

  That free medical care became scarce after the Ruhar took the planet back, right at the time when human medical supplies began running severely low. Now, the Ruhar took on human medical cases only when UNEF HQ pleaded particularly loud and strenuously. The Ruhar no longer cared to bear the expense and effort on a campaign for winning human ‘hearts and minds’ to their side. The humans had no choice and no power; it seemed like while the Ruhar were not actively enemies of humans on Paradise, they wished the problem of humans would simply go away. There were even wild rumors flying around the zPhone network that the Ruhar government was negotiating to hand the planet back to the Kristang, and screw the humans in the process. Jesse though that rumor was wild BS; he couldn’t see the Ruhar giving up a planet so soon after sending so many warships to fight for it. Dave wasn’t so sure about that that; the war had been raging hot and cold for a very long time, and nothing that either side did would surprise him. The Ruhar and Kristang were, he reminded Jesse, aliens. Who knew how they thought?

  “Damn, man, they are coming here,” Jesse announced anxiously. The sound of the aircraft was loud now; they were close and flying low, coming in from the north. As he listened, the sound of one aircraft increased and a Chicken gunship popped above the tree line, climbing rapidly for altitude. The gunship would be flying high cover, and that was not a good sign. Without a word between them, Dave and Jesse dropped their spades and ran straight for the little village center. They were only halfway there, and joined by other people running in from the fields, when a Buzzard transport ship appeared over the trees, flying half sideways. The door on the near side was open, and two Ruhar soldiers in body armor were in the doorway, holding rifles. The aircraft circled the village once, then set down, crabbing sideways to avoid landing on top of precious Earth crops. As the engines spooled down to idle, Dave and Jesse halted with other people, fifty meters away. Some people had their zPhones out, shooting video of the unusual event; others were calling friends in other villages or even UNEF HQ. Jesse and Dave figured that if UNEF HQ or anyone else had useful information about why the Ruhar had landed in tiny Fort Rakovsky, they would have informed the village’s residents already.

  The two Ruhar soldiers stepped down onto the ground, and one activated a translator. The slightly squeaky voice boomed out over the idling engines of the Buzzard. “United States Army Specialists David Czajka and Jesse Colter, of the Tenth Infantry Division, will come with us immediately.”

  “What the hell?” Dave asked, shocked.

  Jesse slowly held his hands up. “I don’t know either, man,” he looked from the rifles of the Ruhar soldiers to the gunpods of the Chicken circling above. “But we better do as they say.”

  The Ruhar soldiers had not handcuffed Jesse and Dave, they also hadn’t answered any questions either. No matter, Jesse told Dave. The Ruhar soldiers were grunts like the two humans; they’d been given orders to pick up two specific humans and bring them somewhere. Grunts didn’t need to know why. After attempting to speak with the Ruhar, which was difficult because the Ruhar had taken away their zPhones, Jesse and Dave gave up. “I don’t think you were pronouncing that right,” Jesse said quietly.

  “Maybe,” Dave admitted his Ruhar was terrible. Like many humans on Paradise, Dave and Jesse had been learning the common Ruhar language using zPhones as tutors. The Keeper faction, of course, thought any effort to learn to speak Ruhar was treason. Most Keepers were trying to learn Kristang, although human tongues found the harsh hissing undertones of lizard speech difficult to master. “I don’t think the problem was what I said, I think they don’t want to talk with us.”

  The four sat mostly in silence for two hours while the Buzzard droned on and on, flying north. The only break was visits to the Buzzard’s cramped bathroom. After two hours, one of the Ruhar unbuckled from his seat, stood up, and offered a zPhone to Dave. “Heep hahp?” The hamster asked, pointing at the zPhone.

  Dave and Jesse smiled to each other. Being cut off from Earth, humans on Paradise missed communications with loved one back home, they missed foods that were not available on Paradise. And they missed music. New music, music they hadn’t already heard over and over. There was an enormous library of music at their fingertips over the zPhone network, so soldiers could hear not only all the music they had brought to the stars with them, they could hear anything their fellow soldiers had brought. At first Jesse thought that was great, he was able to hear music that was new to him. One night, he discovered a rare Johnny Cash live recording that he knew his father would love.

  Then even that got old. Jesse got so desperate to hear something new that he started listening to jazz, then big band music, classical, anything he could find. Ski drew the line when Jesse wanted to play polka music in their hooch one night; Ski had heard way too much polka while growing up, and he hated it. So they began trading music with the French, Indians and Chinese. That broadened their musical horizons considerably; some of it was even good, if you ignored the lyrics you couldn’t understand.

  The big breakthrough came when some unknown soldier, legend had it was a guy in the US Third Infantry, who traded music with a Ruhar soldier. The Ruhar, it was quickly discovered, had no spoken-word music like rap or hip hop, and Ruhar soldiers went crazy for it. They couldn’t get enough of that type of human music, and humans were often able to trade music for tools, clothing and other goodies from the Ruhar. Some enterprising soldiers had formed hip hop and rap acts to provide new music, and their biggest audience were the Ruhar. That was partly because their fellow humans said the music by groups like Ghost Soljas was truly awful; the Ruhar thought all of it was new and different and great.

  “Hip hop!” Dave said with delight, and took the offered zPhone. He fiddled with the controls until something he picked at random came from the speakers. It was hard to hear the music from the zPhone’s tiny speakers, until the Ruhar took the zPhone back, did something with it, and the music played over the speakers in the Buzzard’s cabin. The unpadded cabin of the combat transport, with its droning engines, was not the best venue for listening to music; the two Ruhar didn’t seem to mind. They sat swaying in their seats, heads bobbing in tune with the beat, trying to mouth the words. When the song finished, one of the Ruhar spoke. “Dramaz?” It asked in the slightly squeaky hamster way.

  Jesse shook his head. “Papa-T.”

  “Pahpahtee,” the Ruhar repeated happily.

  “Yup, you got it right,” Jesse said. Then, in broken Ruhar, he asked if the ‘enemy’ soldiers knew where they were going, not expecting an answer.

  To his surprise, the Ruhar shook his head, and over the zPhone translator said “They don’t tell us anything.”

  “Amen to that, brother,” Jesse responded and on an impulse, offered his fist. To his surprise, the Ruhar bumped fists with him. “Ski,” Jesse said, “play the man some tunes.”

  Dave got the zPhone back and selected a playlist of major hit hip hop tunes that the Ruhar might be familiar with, plus some less lesser known favorites. The four of them rocked out, signing along when they knew the words. By the time the Buzzard landed, the Ruhar appeared sympathetic. They slapped the two humans on the shoulder, looking almost sorry. “Don’t worry,” one of them said through a translator, “I think this is only questions for you.”

  Questions about what, the Ruhar couldn’t say. And Dave and Jesse were left dumfounded. What questions could the Ruhar have for two low-ranking farmers?

  The mystery deepened when the two were ushered into a low building near the airfield, then ordered to sit in a windowless conference room. The room had three chairs and a desk. They sat in the two chairs on one side, and waited half an hour until the door opened and female Ruhar walked in. She smiled a toothy Ruhar grin, slid a pair of zPhones across the table, and sat down. “Greetings. I am Baturnah Logellia, the civilian deputy ad
ministrator of this planet. Your friend Joe Bishop called me the ‘Burgermeister’.”

  A lightbulb went on in Jesse’s head. He spoke into the zPhone translator. “Oh, yeah, Bish said something about you. He was talking with you when his Embedded Observation Team was in that village, uh, I forget the name. Sorry.”

  “Teskor,” she said with a smile. “The village was Teskor. Did Joe Bishop tell you what the two of us talked about?”

  “No,” Dave said, with a look at Jesse. “He said it wasn’t anything important. You were like the mayor of the village or something?”

  She laughed. “That is what I let Joe believe. Later, he learned the truth. Gentlemen, you are here today because of Joe. When is the last time you saw him?”

  “The last time?” Ski repeated the question because he couldn’t entirely believe the translator had worked correctly. “Before we left Camp Alpha. That is the training base planet we were on, before we came here,” he explained.

  “I am familiar with Camp Alpha,” she said. “You did not see him after that?”

  “No,” Jesse shook his head. “Bish, that is, Joe, got promoted to sergeant and left our fireteam. Left our unit. We shipped off Camp Alpha separately. That’s the last we saw him. When we landed here, we were deployed to different locations.”

  “I understand,” she seemed satisfied with that answer. “And when is the last time either of you communicated with Joe? Communication of any kind?”

  “Wow, that had to be,” Dave looked at Jesse before answering. “The day before he got arrested? Maybe the day before that. The three of us talked; he told us he had a cushy job as a colonel, planting potatoes. Then he got arrested, because he, you know, refused the lizards’ orders to kill hamster, um, Ruhar civilians. No offense, ma’am.”

  “No offense taken, Dave Czajka. We know humans call us ‘hamsters’, and we in turn have a slang term for your species. Are you certain that you did not receive any communication from Joe after he was arrested? No communication of any kind, not even through other people? Perhaps he sent you a message after he escaped from jail?”