Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  The next two days involved driving part of the days and all of the nights. They were climbing up through foothills that became hills. The roads became more and more rough; in some cases the big truck was mowing down bushes. Only once during daylight did Emby warn them about aircraft approaching, and they had to pull the truck under a stand of trees and cover it as best they could. They never saw an aircraft; Emby said it passed over several kilometers to the south. That incident made Perkins more suspicious about who Emby could be. Their Mysterious Benefactor was not concerned about the truck being detected on sensors, but was worried about an aircraft flying overhead and someone looking down through a window. Perkins could understand Emby having some control or influence over Ruhar sensor coverage, but why wasn’t Emby concerned about their truck being seen by the Kristang ships in orbit? It made no sense. She knew not to bother asking Emby for answers, because Emby wasn’t going to provide answers.

  Their destination was a clearing deep in the woods, off the road. The truck was designed to drive off-road, but Emby advised they might need to cut down a few trees along the way. In the back of the truck was a cutter device that attached to the front of the truck, and chainsaws. Emby had planned a detailed route to the clearing, and tried to assure Perkins getting the truck there was manageable. The clearing was a good place to stash the truck, and wait for a Buzzard to arrive.

  She would believe that when a stolen Buzzard landed in the clearing.

  And she would believe Emby when she saw a giant maser cannon buried eighty meters under the surface of Paradise.

  “Uh oh, Joe,” Skippy announced.

  “Oh, crap. Skippy, can I get through one day without bad news?” I had spent a boring day watching Perkins’ truck driving along a lonely road. “One day! Is that too much to ask? Really?”

  “Don’t ask me, Joe, the universe apparently hates you.”

  “Why? What did I ever do to the universe?”

  “Maybe you cut it off in traffic, or took its parking space, or, ooooh. Maybe you dated the universe’s sister. Hey! Maybe the universe is a girl you dated. That is a sure fire way to get anyone to hate you, Joe.”

  “No, Skippy, girls I date don’t hate me, they just think I’m, you know, meh.”

  “Meh is still better than ‘let’s be friends’, right?”

  “Nothing is worse than the ‘let’s be friends’ speech,” I shook my head, and in the corner I could see Adams’ shoulders shaking with mirth. “What fresh bad news do you have for me today?”

  “The Kristang are planning some bad things in Lemuria, Joe.”

  “They can’t do anything in Lemuria!” I protested. “The terms of the cease fire state that humans are a neutral party and are not to be harmed, or used, by either side. They also can’t be assisted by either side.”

  “I know what the cease fire terms say, Joe, and so do the Kristang. Unfortunately, the cease fire terms do not prevent either side from ‘inspecting’ human-occupied areas, to assure that humans are not stockpiling banned weapons or some bullshit excuse like that. Basically, one of the Kristang commanders is bored, and he wants some action. So his plan for this ‘inspection tour’ is to provoke a group of humans into attacking his team. Then he can hunt unarmed humans in the jungle, for sport. He will be wearing powered armor, with a rifle and air support. Messages I have intercepted state that he intends to land somewhere with a mixed gender population, and then ‘accidentally’ kill or injure several women. He knows this would likely provoke human men to hostile action, which the Kristang see as a weakness by the way. If they are unable to provoke a sufficiently hostile action, they will simply make something up, and kill humans anyway.”

  “Shit.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “Whew,” I let out a long breath and sat back in my chair. “Anything we do to stop the Kristang would risk exposing our presence here, so I would have to clear it with Chotek first. He’s not likely to approve any action. Unless, you know, it were to totally slip my mind,” I added with a meaningful glance at Sergeant Adams.

  “Sir, I can’t hear very well, I think my ears are clogged,” she said, rubbing an ear.

  Damn, I am glad that I brought Adams along. “That is too bad, Sergeant. Skippy, how are the Kristang getting to Lemuria?”

  “A trio of dropships will be leaving the Kristang base in the morning.”

  “Skippy, if those dropships were to suffer fatal mechanical failures at high altitude, I would not lose much sleep over it. If you know what I mean.”

  “I do know what you mean, Joe. However, it is not so simple. As I have explained before, Kristang systems are hardened against cyber attack, because they are wary of interference by their patrons the Thuranin. Most critical control systems aboard Kristang dropships are at least partly manual. Also, their base is a great distance from here, which somewhat limits my abilities in this sort of thing. However, I can promise you that I will do my best. I will get working on it immediately, this type of interference takes a great deal of time. I do not know whether the time available is sufficient for me to accomplish anything effective. It would be best if you began trying to think of an untraceable way to warn the humans on Lemuria. Or something else.”

  Overnight, we weren’t able to think of a good way to notify UNEF of the danger from a Kristang hunting party. I didn’t get much sleep, and when I did sleep, I had nightmares of terrified men and women running through the jungle, being hunted like animals. The problem with sending any message to UNEF was that the Kristang would certainly learn about it and assume the Ruhar had warned the humans. Under the terms of the cease fire agreement, warning UNEF would count as the Ruhar ‘assisting’ the humans. With that part of the cease fire having been violated by the Ruhar, the Kristang would then be free to ‘assist’ the humans in whatever way they felt like. The only plan we had, in case Skippy wasn’t able to do anything, was to track the dropships and try to predict where they would land. Then we would send a warning just to the people in those specific villages. It wasn’t a good plan. And part of me was thinking that if the Kristang planned to land in a village populated by idiotic ‘Keepers’, maybe I shouldn’t warn those assholes. But, I would warn them anyway; the Keepers may be unforgivably stupid but they were humans.

  With five minutes before the hunting party dropships were scheduled to take off the next morning, Skippy told me he was still working on it. And that it would help if I would shut the hell up and stop distracting him. That worried me; I had rarely seen Skippy concentrate so hard on anything.

  Two minutes to go. “Skippy? How are we doing?”

  “We? We aren’t doing anything. I am doing all the work, while you sit there trying to decide whether to pick your nose or not.”

  “I decided against it.”

  “And all of Paradise rejoices at your decision.”

  “Seriously, how are you doing?”

  “Watch your laptop screen, Joe. The action is about to start. No coming attractions, just the main feature that I call ‘A Very Bad Day at the Office’. Ooh, it’s starting now.”

  The lead dropship, with the Kristang commander aboard, was the first to take off. Their dropships were ugly things, with small wings tipped with V-shaped winglets. The Kristang optimized their dropships for combat in the vacuum of space; their aerodynamics were not the best. The first dropship lifted about ten meters off the ground, and hovered while I guess the pilots were checking their systems. Then it increased power and climbed, at first at an angle, then it zoomed straight up fast; to my eyes too fast. It started to wobble and when it got to what looked like three to four hundred feet, it flipped over on its back and fell straight down like a rock. Skippy kept a running commentary. “Oooh, see, Joe, you’re not supposed to fly straight up like that. You’re supposed to clear the airfield perimeter, and then gain altitude. Otherwise, something like this could happen. Wow, this looks like it might be painful.” The dropship crashed on its back right on top of another dropship and broke into three
pieces, with burning chunks flying around from both dropships. “Yup, yup, that’s definitely painful. Oooh, would you look at that, now the third dropship is on fire,” he said as a big chunk of flaming debris hit the third dropship, which had just tried to lift off to get out of the danger zone. “Hey, good for them, some lizards survived from that third dropship, and they’re out and sort of crawling away. Uh oh.” A tall light pole that was at the edge of the tarmac had been struck near its base by a piece of debris, and it wobbled. Then, slowly at first and picking up speed, it toppled over, with the heavy lights smashing right onto one of the crawling Kristang. “Oh! That had to hurt. I’m no expert, Joe, because I don’t feel physical pain, but I’m thinking that pretty much had to hurt real bad, right? Yup, that guy’s not moving. Those other guys really should move faster; I have a feeling the missiles on the racks of that dropship have become unstable. We’d better go to super slow motion on this video, Joe.” As he said that, three missiles that had been trapped under the third dropship ignited and streaked away, just as the third dropship exploded. “Wow!” Two of the missiles bounced and skidded across the tarmac, one hit a large building and the other flew in the yawning open door of a hangar. Both buildings blew sky-high as the missile warheads detonated. There were secondary explosions from the hangar as whatever had been in there blew up. We barely had time to take in that super slo-mo video when the camera view switched to the third missile, which had gone in the other direction, across the tarmac. Across the tarmac, between two buildings, flipping over high into the air, doing cartwheels and then plunging downward. Down, directly in the open door of the Kristang’s ammunition bunker and down the underground tunnel. “Wow, now there is something you don’t see every day,” Skippy commented. “What are the odds of that, huh? That was poor operational security by the Kristang, I think, leaving the bunker door open like that. Three, two, one-”

  The underground ammo dump blew, and the video feed cut out. The video then switched to a view from high above, Skippy must have hacked into the sensors of a Kristang ship in orbit. All we could see was the top of an angry, growing mushroom cloud where the base had been.

  “Holy shit, Skippy,” I said, stunned. Adams couldn’t believe it either, and Desai had her hand in front of her mouth.

  “Golly, I hope those lizards who were crawling away from that dropship are Ok,” Skippy said seriously. “Although, to tell the truth, I wouldn’t get my hopes up for them. Gosh darn it, that was a truly unfortunate series of events, I guess. Well, shit happens, right?”

  “Overkill is underrated?” I guessed.

  “I have no idea what you are talking about, Joe. However, I can say it is unlikely that any assholes from that base will be going on hunting trips in Lemuria any time soon.”

  “That was a nice touch, having the light pole fall on that guy,” Adams observed.

  “Huh?” Skippy asked. “Nope, that was shear blind luck, Sarge Marge. As you understand luck anyway. I couldn’t have planned something like that. That guy must have some seriously bad karma built up from a past life. Or this one.”

  “Thank you anyway,” I said. “Any chance this could have blowback on us, or UNEF?” Thinking about that possibility, I feared that I really should have told Chotek about it beforehand.

  “Ha! Zero, Joe. The opposite of infinity. To the Kristang, your species are primitive cavemen, no way would they ever consider lowly humans to be involved. Certainly, the Kristang might suspect this was not merely an incredibly unfortunate accident. But if they suspect anyone, they will suspect the Ruhar. They won’t say that openly, because the commander of that base is politically connected to senior clan leadership, an admitting that his poor security allowed the Ruhar to sabotage his equipment would be damaging. Even if they knew for certain that somehow the Ruhar were involved, they won’t do anything that jeopardizes the cease fire.”

  “Hmm,” I mused. “If we somehow provided evidence that it was the Ruhar, that could get the Ruhar and the Kristang into the shooting war we want. No, no, that won’t work,” I quickly discarded my own idea. “We need a shooting war that takes out the Kristang battlegroup, so the balance of power in the negotiations shifts back toward the Ruhar, not just a ground war. Damn it. Ok, Skippy, uh, I know you could not possibly have been involved in the extremely unfortunate accident we witnessed this morning.”

  “Perish the thought,” he said cheerily. “Joe, I suggest you practice your innocent face, because the light from that explosion will reach the Dutchman soon, and Chocula is sure to contact you about it.”

  “Crap,” I hadn’t thought about that. “I’d better call him first, inform him that we detected a large explosion at a Kristang base. And that we know nothing about it.”

  “Gosh darn it, Joe. It is truly too bad we don’t have any video that could clue Chotek in on what caused the explosion,” Skippy lamented.

  “That is too bad,” I agreed.

  “Hey Joe, after you call the Count, how about you get some popcorn and we watch the video again? I have a feeling there are some surprises.”

  “Surprises? We already saw what happened.”

  “No, Joe, you dumdum. I mean surprises for the Kristang. That hunting trip when terribly wrong, didn’t it?”

  I called the Dutchman. Neither Chotek nor Chang sounded like they believed that we were not involved in the massive explosion. Chotek didn’t directly accuse me of causing the incident, so I really didn’t care. I was, however, put on notice that there had better not be any more such incidents.

  “Skippy, I don’t think we can do that trick again, not for a while anyway.”

  “No problem. Do not expect me to do that often, Joe. I got lucky this time. The pilot of that lead dropship practiced poor cyber security. He had been having trouble with new software of the dropship’s navigation system, so he left it on overnight to run a diagnostic. I was able to partially get in that way, and it took me almost to the last second to get the details right. I wouldn’t count on my doing that again.”

  Lieutenant Irene Striebich looked again at the message on her zPhone in disbelief. “Explain this to me again?”

  Shauna took a breath before responding. “Which part?”

  “The part where you want me to steal a Buzzard, and fly you and your partners around on a secret mission. A mission you can’t tell me anything about.”

  “I can’t tell you until-”

  “Shauna, stealing a Buzzard isn’t just difficult, it’s impossible. I know, I used to fly them. Since the Ruhar took their aircraft back, they implemented security features. All pilots need a keycard that is assigned to each authorized flight. And a password, plus there is a biometric scanner. No human would pass the biometric check. If I somehow do get access, the startup procedure for a Buzzard takes over five minutes even for an emergency launch. During that time, someone at the airbase would hear. A Buzzard sitting on the ground is vulnerable, I can’t engage shields, weapons or stealth until the ship is in the air. One rifle could take out an engine fan blade, and the Buzzard wouldn’t be going anywhere. It’s impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible. We can do it.”

  “We? You mean these friends of yours that you can’t tell me about?

  “Yes. Irene, do you want to fly again?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “If we can get you a Buzzard, will you fly it for us?” Shauna asked. She had thought this would be easier.

  Irene didn’t answer for a moment.

  Shauna asked another way. “If we can steal a Buzzard, will that prove that we’re real?”

  “It will prove you can do the impossible. Shauna, this mission, it’s really that important? This isn’t some crazy cowboy shit you’ve gotten into?” Irene knew that Shauna was as desperate for infantry duty as Irene was to fly again.

  “Irene, this mission could be everything for UNEF’s survival. That’s all I can tell you, until you pick us up.”

  “I don’t believe this,” Irene said almost to herself.
“You got me, I’m in. If, if, you get me a Buzzard to fly.”

  “Deal,” Shauna said, and gave a thumbs up to Major Perkins. Perkins had been listening on her own zPhone, and returned the gesture.

  Skippy and I had been listening also. “They got us a pilot, Skippy. Now how do we get a Buzzard for her? She’s in Lemuria, there aren’t any Buzzards there. And what about all that stuff she said about it being impossible to steal a Buzzard? I assume you can get around the keycard and the biometric stuff, but is she right about how long it takes to start up a cold ship?”

  “She is correct about that, Joe. Getting access for her is child’s play for me, of course.”

  “You didn’t answer my question. What is your plan for getting around the startup time problem? Because if you’re waiting for me to dream something up, I hate to disappoint you.” My own pilot experience was limited to Thuranin dropships, and the normal startup procedure took over seven minutes. It was possible to skip a lot of steps and go from activating the power to the engines being able to fly in four minutes; that was the absolute fastest it could be done. There were too many systems that needed to power up in sequence to make the process go any faster. “This Irene person is right; it is impossible to steal a Buzzard. As soon as any Ruhar at the airbase hear those engines starting, they will react, and this Irene won’t get anywhere.”

  “Oh sure, Joe, if you do it the hard way. Duh. I plan to cheat.”

  “Can you give me more details there, Skippy?”

  “Simple. We’ll have the Ruhar steal a Buzzard for her.”

  Irene Striebich tried to relax in the back of the Buzzard. The ship had showed up at her village that afternoon, and she had been ordered to come with them. It had happened exactly as Shauna told her it would, so she boarded the Buzzard without question. There were only three Ruhar aboard; two pilots up front and one soldier watching Irene. The soldier seemed bored, and told her only that they had been ordered to bring Shauna to their airbase, he didn’t know why. Other than that, the soldier didn’t want to talk.