Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  The ship droned on for over an hour; Irene calculated in her head that they had passed over the ocean and were now approaching or already over the coast of Tenturo. Shauna had told her to expect what happened next, so Irene was not worried when the droning of the engines stuttered, then cut out. The guard shook himself out of the half-asleep position he had been in, and spoke to the pilots. Since the guard had taken her zPhone, she didn’t understand most of the hurried conversation, but she understood when the guard motioned for her to tug her harness tightly. The engines restarted but surged and from the tone, Irene could tell neither of the engines were developing much power. There was more conversation between the soldier and the pilots as the Buzzard descended rapidly enough for Irene’s stomach to flutter. Weight came back as the pilots slowed their descent and then flared for landing. The soldier braced into a crash position, indicating Irene should do the same. The soldier looked genuinely afraid and Irene tried to mimic his expression, although he wasn’t paying much attention to her.

  With a final roar of thrusters being used to provide emergency supplemental lift to the failing engines, the Buzzard hovered for a moment, then set down roughly enough that Irene was glad she had been in a crash position. One, then the other engine shut down, and the cockpit door opened. Both pilots came out, worried expressions on their hamster faces. They popped the side door latch and went out to inspect the ship. The guard unstrapped and walked toward the doorway to join them. When he saw Irene reaching for her own straps, he shook his head. “You stay,” he said in broken English, pointing to her seat emphatically.

  Irene nodded and held up her hands as the soldier walked down the fold-out stairs. As soon as he was out of sight, she unbuckled her straps and got out of the seat as Shauna had instructed. So far, events had gone as Shauna said they would, now was the critical moment.

  And, right on schedule, there was a ‘click’ sound as a locker door unlatched. Just as Shauna said it would. Crouching to avoid being seen through the window, Irene went forward to the locker and pulled out one of the two rifles that Shauna had said would be there. Now the last test. Irene selected the stun setting, flicked the safety off, and put her finger on the trigger. Normally, a Ruhar weapon would disable itself if touched by a human.

  This one stayed active. Confident now, although confident in who or what Irene didn’t know, she checked again that the rifle was set to stun and popped her head up to glance out the small window. Both pilots and the soldier were standing together, a few meters in front of the left engine, looking at it and talking. Irene stepped into the doorway and was able to take aim before the soldier saw her out of the corner of his eye and reached for his pistol. It was too late for him. She stunned him with one shot, then switched aim to the two unarmed pilots. Moving more slowly and deliberately than she wanted to, she shot one pilot, then had to leap down the stairs to take aim as the other pilot ran out of sight behind the left engine pod. Irene shot him in the legs and he went down, sprawled full-length in the grass.

  Following the instructions Shauna had sent to her, Irene took zPhones away from two of the Ruhar, and used the soldier’s knife to cut away the locator beacons that were sewn into the collar of the pilot’s jackets. Then she dragged first the soldier and the two pilots away from the Buzzard, so they wouldn’t be harmed by the engine exhaust. The Ruhar were heavy, Irene was grateful for the hard work she’d been doing working on a farm. She left the pistol with the soldier, and activated his zPhone. As Shauna had said, the soldier’s zPhone now had only one function; a map. The map would allow the three Ruhar to walk to a village on the coast within a week. The three aliens began stirring awake, so she stunned them again, then went back into the Buzzard and brought back a box of Ruhar field rations, three blankets and a pack that contained useful items like a tarp, knives and a shovel. The three Ruhar would be fine as long as they didn’t stay in place waiting for rescue. Because rescue would not be coming for them; Shauna’s friends had somehow arranged to fake a Buzzard crash over the ocean. Any rescue aircraft would be looking for wreckage far out at sea; without the pilots knowing, the Buzzard’s transponder had turned off in the middle of the flight.

  Everything had worked exactly as Shauna told Irene it would; now came the final test. She went back in the Buzzard, secured the door, sat in the pilot seat and took a deep breath. All the instruments were on, and the controls didn’t freeze when she touched the control stick. One of the biometric security features of a Buzzard was a reader built into the control stick; it scanned the user’s DNA to assure an authorized pilot was touching the controls. No way could a human pass a DNA scan.

  Yet Irene did pass the scan. All the controls still worked perfectly. And- “Oh, fuck me,” Irene gasped. With a flicker, the cockpit displays all switched from Ruhar script to English. She had been trained to read Ruhar, but somehow the flight systems had reverted to the settings installed when humans had controlled aircraft on Paradise.

  Irene decided she could puzzle about that later, after she was in the air. The right, then the left engine started normally. Because the aircraft had just landed and systems other than the engines had not been shut down, she was able to go to full power and lift off in less than a minute. After reaching a hundred meters, she circled the area to check that the three Ruhar were unharmed. They were, laying prone on the grass where she had left them. Irene pointed the Buzzard’s nose toward the coordinates Shauna had sent and kept the Buzzard flying low and at a moderate speed. As soon as the system was ready, she engaged the stealth field, and suddenly the windows went dark as light was bent around the aircraft’s hull. No matter; she was trained to fly on instruments.

  After setting the autopilot and verifying that all systems were operating normally, she pulled one of the two zPhones out of a pocket. “Shauna, it’s Irene. I’m in the air.”

  “Great! You have a clear path to us, there aren’t any aircraft along your flightpath right now. The Ruhar have a dozen aircraft doing search and rescue where they think you went down over the ocean.”

  “All the cockpit displays are in English instead of Ruhar. How the hell did you do that?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I told you, we have friends. Everything went Ok?” Shauna knew it had, for Emby had sent them a message that Irene had successfully launched and was on the way to pick them up.

  “Yes, everything went fine. I’ll be there in,” she checked the flight computer, “about an hour. You’re going to tell me what this top secret mission is after I land?”

  “I will. And it’s going to blow your mind,” Shauna said with a laugh.

  “Giant maser cannons?” Irene exclaimed in disbelief.

  “Those were my words exactly, Lieutenant,” Jesse agreed. “Ain’t that some shit?”

  “And you think this Mysterious Benefactor is a group of native Ruhar who don’t like their government trading away this planet?”

  “We don’t think that, we’re guessing,” Major Perkins corrected their new pilot. “Based on what Emby has been able to do, the facts so far fit our guess.”

  “We’re going to reactivate these projectors, so we can shoot the Kristang battlegroup out of the sky?” Irene asked.

  “That’s the idea,” Perkins agreed.

  “Yes, ma’am. Then we’ll still have the problem of the Ruhar government wanting to sell Paradise to the Kristang,” Irene said skeptically.

  “I believe Emby is hoping that if the Ruhar fleet has to fight for this planet again, they’ll want to keep it. Right now, it’s too easy for their government to take whatever they can get and bail on us.” Perkins explained. “Are you regretting your decision to join us?” If Striebich wanted to pull out now, that was going to be a major problem. Perkins couldn’t let her go anywhere, or have access to a zPhone.

  “No ma’am,” Irene shook her head emphatically. “This is a little tough to take all at once. I hate the feeling of knowing those lizard ships are hanging above my head all the time. If we can do something about that, I’m a
ll in. What’s the next step?”

  “You have got to be joking,” Irene said with shock after Dave dropped the truck’s tailgate and pulled aside the canvas flap. It was a big truck, and the cargo box was fairly jammed with boxes and equipment. “How is all of this crap supposed to fit in my Buzzard?”

  “It’s not, ma’am,” Dave said. “Mostly we just need to take the drill rig with us. A lot of this,” he pointed to the cargo box, “is fuel cells for the truck and the Buzzard. And we have,” he hopped up into the cargo box and tilted it toward the pilot, “food. Real food.” He held up an American MRE pouch, then a package labeled ‘Chicken and Dumplings’.

  Irene gasped. “Where did you get that?”

  Dave shrugged. “Emby had the truck loaded up like Santa’s sleigh for us. There’s also two full boxes with cans of nutrient mush if you prefer that, ma’am.”

  “No! Real food would be excellent,” Irene said with delight. “I guess that drill rig will fit, I’ll have to see it.”

  “Emby assured us that this type of portable drill rig was designed to be carried by a Buzzard.” Shauna assured the pilot. “We practiced unloading and loading it yesterday. Emby even included the tiedown strap kit for securing the drill rig in the back of a Buzzard.”

  “You’re sure about this?” Irene asked, because she was not sure at all.

  “Yes. Look, the cover comes off the truck’s cargo box, and the truck has a crane for loading its own stuff. There is also a mini forklift kind of thing, with treads so it can operate off-road. Plus, the drill rig is self-propelled.” The drill rig’s base had six articulated legs so it could walk on its own just about anywhere. Seeing the insect-like legs in action was spine-chillingly creepy at first, Shauna thought. There was no denying it was very effective.

  Irene looked at her Buzzard, sitting under camouflage netting and tree branches. She would not be flying it again until after nightfall. Emby had confirmed the Ruhar still thought her ship had gone down over the ocean; they still had several aircraft flying search missions. And there was a full-scale investigation into how a Buzzard had been sent to pick up a single human in Lemuria; Ruhar military command on the planet was not able to trace where the order had come from. According to Emby, they would never discover who had issued the order. To be safe, she was not going to fly until the early hours of the next morning. “If you’re sure, show me. Let’s get it loaded.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  To Irene’s surprise, everything they needed for drilling down to the first projector fit inside the Buzzard, with room to spare. The Ruhar designers had cleverly packaged the portable drill rig so it collapsed on itself, and could crawl up the Buzzard’s rear ramp on its own. They wouldn’t be able to deploy the drill rig that way at a projector site, but it was still an impressive feat of engineering. Everything was squared away with two hours to spare, so the five caught an quick nap and were awakened in the pitch dark night by message from Emby.

  After a quick breakfast of nutrient mushes, they checked that the truck was securely hidden, then Irene began walking around the Buzzard for a preflight inspection.

  “What kind of name is Striebich, ma’am?” Jesse asked as he held a light for their pilot. He pronounced the name ‘Stree-bick’ as Irene had done.

  “It’s German,” Irene said as she opened an access panel and checked an actuator.

  “German?” Jesse said, surprised.

  “I know,” Irene laughed and looked at her arm’s light brown skin. “My father is German and the joke was that I came from gypsies. My mother’s name is Elena Ramos, she was in Germany with the Army and married a German man over there.”

  “She was in the Army, ma’am?”

  Irene nodded. “She was a Blackhawk pilot; she’s why I became a pilot. She retired only three years before the hamsters hit us,” she frowned. Now the Ruhar were the closest thing UNEF had to allies. Life was certainly strange sometimes. “Before we left Earth, she talked about reenlisting to join UNEF, but it would have meant six months of training and she might not get flight duty anyway.”

  “Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t gotten the recall notice,” Jesse said honestly. “My father, my uncle, my cousin and I were all about to head out on a hunting trip, we planned to be gone a week or more. We were loading the truck when my mother told me I had a message from the 10th Division on my email. My cousin told me to ignore it, but I knew I couldn’t. If we’d gotten that truck loaded earlier, I might not have seen that message until it was too late to go offworld. There wasn’t any cellphone service up in the hills back then.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Irene said as she closed the access panel. “I was already back with the 10th Aviation at Fort Drum when we got the order to deploy to Ecuador.” She walked over to the left engine and pointed for Jesse to shine the light into the exhaust. “How did you get involved with this?”

  “Us?” Jesse asked. “The four of us were all together because of Joe Bishop.” He told her the whole astonishing story as she finished the external preflight check.

  “Do you think Bishop is really alive?” Irene asked quietly, trying to be sensitive that Jesse had been Joe’s friend.

  “Major Perkins says the hamsters think he is. Me?” Jesse scratched his head. “All I know is that Joe is one lucky son of a bitch, always has been. He also has a nose for trouble; if there is trouble within a hundred miles, you can be sure Bish will find himself in the middle of it sooner or later. What I can say is, I hope if he did find trouble, he didn’t drag anyone else into it.”

  “He’s right, Joe,” Skippy said. “You sure dragged me and the whole Merry Band of Pirates into a huge mess, didn’t you?”

  “Me?” I protested. We had been listening to Jesse and Irene talk through their zPhones, which they didn’t realize were transmitting. I did feel guilty about eavesdropping; the reason I justified listening to them talk had been to prevent them from making mistakes they couldn’t recover from. “You are the one who got me into trouble, Skippy. If you hadn’t opened the door to that warehouse, I would be on a farm in Lemuria right now.” Or dead, I didn’t say. “Turn it off, please.”

  “Are you sure, Joe?”

  “Yes. You’re listening, you can tell us if they make a big mistake. It’s creepy for me to be listening to them. I don’t even know this Irene.”

  “You read her service record and the profile I put together, Joe.”

  “That’s not the same as meeting her in person.”

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” said the beer can, who never actually met anyone ‘in person’. “Lt. Striebich is now in the cockpit and running her preflight checks there. I could tell her that I know everything is perfect with the aircraft, but a pilot would never take anyone’s word about that, right?”

  “You got it. I’ve only flown Thuranin dropships, but before I fly, I am checking everything myself.”

  “Understood. While we’re waiting, Joe, I have a question.”

  “Skippy, it is unlikely that I have an answer. Especially if your question is about 17th century Hungarian poetry.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. When you were at your parents’ house, you borrowed your father’s truck to drive into town.”

  “Yeah, so? I can drive, Skippy.” Although, right then, I wondered whether my driver’s license had expired. I had been away from Earth for a while, after all.

  “Your driving and piloting skills are debatable, Joe, but that is not my question. Why were you driving a truck? Why don’t you have a Corvette?”

  “A Corvette?” That question completely surprised me. “I can’t afford a Corvette, Skippy. Besides, what would I do with a car like that in Maine? It snows there six months a year. Why do you ask that?”

  “I thought all astronauts drive Corvettes. Technically, you are an astronaut, Joe. You have flown spacecraft by yourself, and you even performed a spacedive.”

  “Huh. I never thought of myself as an astronaut, Skippy. Maybe you’re right.”

 
; “Mmm, maybe not. Real astronauts get laid a lot more than you.”

  “That’s because women know those guys are astronauts, Skippy. I can’t tell anyone what we’ve been doing out here.”

  “Also, astronauts are a lot cooler than you, Joe.”

  “Good bye, Skippy.”

  Sergeant Adams woke me and Captain Desai up early the next morning, as Perkins and her team approached the first projector site in the Buzzard. Many things could go wrong at this point, we all wanted to know what was happening in real time. I told Skippy to show us video from the Buzzard’s cameras and sensors, and we would listen when they talked to each other on zPhones, but we weren’t going to eavesdrop this time.

  “Are they clear?” Irene asked over the zPhone earpiece. The Buzzard’s belly camera gave her a view beneath her, and Dave in the back was remotely aiming the camera where it needed to be. Still, with tons of equipment to be lowered to the ground, it made sense to be certain.

  “Major Perkins confirms they are clear, yes. Should I begin lowering the sling now?” Dave asked.

  “Do it. I want the drill rig on the ground before the wind picks up,” Irene ordered. This whole operation was too complicated, but she didn’t know an easier way. The Kristang had deliberately installed the projectors in remote areas that would be unlikely to be developed for habitation, industry or agricultural use. In most cases, this meant that trees had grown over the sites during the intervening years; and there was no way to land the Buzzard at the sites without the laboriously slow process of cutting a clearing. With the Buzzard, they had flown to any clear area near the first site and lowered Perkins and Jesse to the ground on a cable. Those two then cleared just enough trees out of the way, while Irene landed the Buzzard and she helped Dave and Shauna unload the drill rig and secure it in a sling. The drill rig and its associated gear was now awkwardly slung beneath the Buzzard and needed to be carefully lowered through the gap in the trees. The sun would be rising in less than an hour, so they needed to get the drill rig, Shauna and Dave on the ground as quickly as possible. Then Irene would park the Buzzard close by, cover it with a camouflage net and wait. Wait, while the four others drilled down to a hidden chamber where a secret giant maser cannon could be reactivated.