Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  The weather forecast from Emby was favorable, except that Irene expected the light breeze to pick up and become unpredictably gusty as the sun came over the horizon. The drill rig needed to be on the ground and the sling cable retracted before then. If the wind was blowing too strongly for Shauna and Dave to be lowered to the ground by cable, Irene could land the Buzzard and those two could walk to the projector site. The sling with the drill rig was fitted with thrusters that could be steered remotely, or it had a limited ability to guide itself. Perkins and Colter had hammered a target into the ground where they wanted the sling to make contact, the sling would home in on that spot. Irene only needed to hover the Buzzard over the opening in the forest canopy, and either Dave or the sling’s automated guidance system would handle dropping the package. That was great news for Irene; she had limited experience with hauling cargo by sling, and no recent experience.

  It was nerve-wracking to hover the Buzzard, one eye on the instruments and one eye on the treetops to the east. When the wind kicked up, leaves on the trees to the east would flutter and signal when the wind would reach the Buzzard. Irene used the leaves to anticipate when she would need to maneuver the lumbering Buzzard. In training, she had been able to hover within a two meter sphere; never varying more than a meter in any direction. In training, she never had a multiton weight suspended on the end of a cable beneath her ship.

  “Down! It’s down,” Shauna called out over the intercom. “Cable released.”

  Irene had felt the cable go slack, she had been watching the camera feed to anticipate when to reduce power. She couldn’t help allowing herself a self-congratulatory smile; the drop had been nearly perfect despite the morning winds picking up already. “Retract cable,” she ordered. “Jarrett, Czajka, the wind is too rough for you two to rappel down. I need to land and you can hike in.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Dave replied unhappily. Looking down at the waving treetops, he decided that maybe he shouldn’t be unhappy about having to walk a kilometer or two through the woods that morning. “I’ll inform Major Perkins.”

  “No,” Irene said flatly. “No.”

  “I wouldn’t be asking if-” Shauna started to say.

  “Shauna, no. No way! I became a pilot to be in the air, not underground.”

  “Irene, please, think about it. None of us can do it, we tried. Even Major Perkins tried, and she’s bigger than I am. If we have to lift the drill and start again, it will take another full day, and Emby is already pushing us for being too slow.”

  “I don’t believe this, Shauna.” It occurred to Irene then that under normal circumstances, Shauna should have addressed her as ‘Lieutenant’ or Ma’am, and she should have called the Specialist ‘Jarrett’. These were anything but normal circumstances. “What happens if I get stuck down there? Who will fly the Buzzard?”

  Perkins’ team had gotten the drill down eighty three meters before it broke through to an open chamber; a chamber that didn’t appear on their subsurface scans. Then they retracted the exploratory drill and fitted the widest drill bit available. It was slow going because of their inexperience with drilling, even with Emby guiding them. More than once, Emby had sent messages exhorting them to move faster. An exasperated Major Perkins had replied that if Emby wanted them to drill more quickly, they should have sent someone with experience.

  Finally, after what Perkins knew was far too much time, the big drill was done. And then they discovered the problem Emby had apparently not considered. None of the four drill crew members could fit down the hole. Shauna had tried first, but she was five feet seven and her shoulders simply were too wide. For once, she regretted the weight training she had done to qualify for infantry duty. The two men had made a halfhearted attempt to fit, then Major Perkins had tried, but as she was five feet ten there was no way she would fit either. They were about to drill a second hole next to the first, in order to widen the opening, when Shauna thought of their pilot.

  Irene Striebich was barely at the Army’s minimum height requirement for pilots of five feet four inches, and that had been with her standing with perfect posture, stretching her neck. She was petite and slender and she’d always been self-conscious about her diminutive size. Now, as far as Major Perkins and Emby thought, her petite frame was an asset. “Shauna, there has got to be some other way to do this.”

  “Skippy, come on, isn’t there another way to do this? Does she really need to squeeze down that hole?” The thought of me doing that made my skin crawl.

  “Another way like what, Joe?” Skippy asked, sounding annoyed.

  “I don’t know. Like, can we do it remotely?”

  “Gosh, Joe, I never thought of that. What a brilliant idea,” he said sarcastically. “You know, I don’t have the owner’s manual for that type of Kristang projector, so I looked it up on YouTube. Half the links were people doing stupid stuff, like asking me if we can do this remotely. No we can’t, you dumdum. The Kristang didn’t want anyone waking up those projectors remotely, that’s why they physically disabled them. Someone needs to go down there and reconnect the power connections and plug things in. I’d do it because I can fit down the hole easily, but, darn it, I don’t have thumbs. You jackass.”

  “Sorry. Ok, send Perkins a message, Striebich needs to try. She isn’t claustrophobic, is she?”

  “Not according to her service records, but who wouldn’t be claustrophobic while going eighty meters down a narrow, dark tube?”

  “Crap. Ask her to try. If she can’t do it, that’s understandable.”

  Irene’s whole body was shaking when she felt her feet finally had room to move. She swung her feet around, trying to find some place to stand. The camera on the end of the drill had shown an oval-shaped chamber, which now had a cone of dirt below where the drill had punched through the composite ceiling. The cable continued lowering her, with her shoulders scraping the sides even though she had her arms squeezed as tightly together in front of her as she could. Without being able to move her head enough to look down, and her eyes only inches from the tube’s wall, she couldn’t see anything at first. The drill had sprayed a coating on the hole that hardened and prevented the dirt and rocks from collapsing in on her; Emby had said the coating was considerably tougher than steel. Emby was not eighty meters down in a skinny hole.

  Light! Even looking straight ahead, she was able to see light coming up from below. Then her right foot touched something soft. It was the cone of dirt. She continued descending and both of her feet found solid ground, then she was able to move her arms. Her shoulders screamed at her from being cramped in one position for so long. And her eyes blinked from the sudden unaccustomed glare of the lights they had tossed down the hole.

  When she could stand, she managed to report in. “I’m down,” she said, and tugged on the cable twice for emphasis. “No surprises here, it looks like it did from the camera. What does Emby want me to do first?” Irene wanted to accomplish her tasks as quickly as possible, so she could clip the cable back on her harness and be pulled up. Up and out.

  “Outstanding, Striebich,” Major Perkins replied. “Here’s what you do-”

  “Success, Joe!” Skippy shouted excitedly. “I have established a link to the projector, and I have complete control. All systems fully operational. Who’d have guessed it; lizards can build some good stuff when they really try.”

  “That is great, Skippy,” I said with relief. “Tell Major Perkins to congratulate Striebich for us, please.” I knew Skippy would write the message in a way that Perkins could not tell it was coming from a human source.

  “Will do, Joe. Hmm, I will also tell Major Perkins that Striebich should do go anywhere near the control panel on the far left. Because that is for the explosive charges that will blow the soil off the top of the projector and extend the maser cannon’s muzzle.”

  “Please do that,” I said seriously. It was great that Perkins’ team had gotten a maser cannon reactivated. It was not great that, from the time they got the drill rig initiall
y loaded into the Buzzard, it had taken four days. Even with Skippy hacking into the sensors of both Ruhar and Kristang, we needed to get at least eight projectors online as soon as possible. There was too much risk of Perkins’ team being discovered. “We need to think of ways to speed up the whole process.” Perkins had told ‘Emby’ that she was confident future projectors could be activated much quicker, now that her crew knew how get a drill rig to a site and how to operate it. “And I don’t know how many times we can ask Striebich to squeeze down that tiny hole. If I did that, my nerves would be shot. And she needs to fly that Buzzard, we can’t risk her having a nervous breakdown.”

  “Oh, that’s not a problem, Joe. Next time, I’ll explain to Major Perkins how to make the big drill bit oscillate, so it creates a larger diameter hole. Your buddies Cornpone and Ski should fit down there easily.”

  “What? Why the hell didn’t you tell them that this time?”

  “Truthfully, I didn’t consider the difficulty of one of you monkeys squeezing down a hole like that. I don’t have physical limitations, so I didn’t think of it. That’s supposed to be your job, Joe. We could have told them to oscillate the drill bit this time, but they already had the hole open, and making the hole larger would have required as much time as drilling a second hole.”

  “Crap.” He was right, it was my job to think of practical issues. “My bad. Yes, please inform Perkins about how to drill a bigger hole in the future. Striebich should be happy about that. How’s the weather forecast?”

  “I suggested to Major Perkins that her team move with alacrity, because I am expecting rather strong thunderstorms tomorrow. It would behoove them to get the drill disassembled and the sling operation completed as quickly as possible.”

  “Alacrity? Behoove? Really, Skippy?”

  “Hey, Joe, Major Perkins has a master’s degree that your Army paid for. And unlike you, she paid attention in high school. It would be good for you to expand your vocabulary sometimes, Colonel Joe.”

  “Whatever. You knock that Kristang battlegroup out of the sky, and I’ll let you teach me one new word every day. Deal?”

  “Seems like I’m doing a lot more work than you, but, I accept.”

  “Uh oh, Joe, we are running out of time,” Skippy announced. “We need to strike today.”

  “What? Only four projectors have been activated, you told us that Perkins needed to get eight online, at minimum. Why the rush?”

  “Circumstances have changed; I have new information. The Kristang commander is feeling confident in his control of Paradise, so he has scheduled a war game to commence later today; in about nine hours. Ships will soon begin dispersing to participate in the attack, and we will lose the ability to hit them.”

  “Crap! We can attack with only four projectors?”

  “Oh, yeah, Joe, it’s certainly not ideal, but it will work well enough. The four that are now active will be sufficiently effective against the battlegroup for an initial attack. It is for follow-on defense that we will need to have more projectors to provide full coverage. The only downside to our hastily-planned attack is that the commander of the Kristang task force is not aboard his command ship right now. He came down to Paradise yesterday, in order to investigate a bizarre accident. It seems that a dropship crashed, and resulted in blowing up most of a Kristang airbase.”

  “Huh. That is bizarre,” I rolled my eyes. “I wonder how that happened?”

  “I have no idea, Joe. That is a puzzle for sure. Anyway, when Admiral Kekrando left the wrecked airbase, he is really pissed about it by the way, he flew up to a destroyer instead of the command ship. We need to take out the command ship first, it represents a significant portion of their combat power. I will hit Kekrando’s destroyer if I can; I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “I am sure this Kekrando guy will not be heartbroken if you are not able to target the destroyer he is on.”

  “Good point. Hey, I can send him a ‘Sorry that we missed you’ card?”

  “Let’s not, and say we did.”

  With only four projectors online, their area of coverage was limited. Each projector could only shoot within a cone of about twenty eight degrees. Perkins’ team had activated four projectors that were close to each other, in order to bring projectors online as quickly as possible. While that made sense in terms of logistics, it meant there were huge areas of the sky we couldn’t hit. Skippy could only guarantee to hit eight ships, fourteen at the most. The Kristang ships were varying their patrol patterns, to prevent the Ruhar commodore from being tempted into an opportunistic raid.

  We did have an advantage, if we had time to use it. Each Kristang warship was assigned a patrol route by the command ship in order to coordinate their coverage of the planet’s surface. Most of the communication was from the command ship’s computer to the other ships’ navigation computers, so the crews were not directly involved in most cases. Skippy had been able to gain limited access to the Kristang command ship’s computer; he used that access to alter the patrol patterns. Although the patrol routes were supposed to be random, there was logic to them. The method of assigning patrol routes was to prevent too many ships from being bunched together, because that left gaps in coverage and made the task force an easy target. The challenge for Skippy was to get as many Kristang ships within the strike cones of our four projectors, before some alert Kristang realized something was very wrong. Mathematically, he figured the best he could do was bring fourteen ships within our strike cones at any one time. I told him not to try for the perfect solution; that carried too much risk of the enemy being alerted and blowing our whole plan. If Skippy could get a dozen ships in the virtual crosshairs of our projectors, he was to tell me immediately, so I could press the Big Red Button on my zPhone. And if there was any sign the Kristang were catching on to our plan, we were going to shoot right away. Even with the Kristang ships flying unaltered patrol routes, there were usually six or seven ships within the strike cones at any one time.

  Even the awesome power of the projectors would not allow us to clear enemy ships from the skies over Paradise if those ships had been ready for our attack. If those ships had their defensive shields active, even the searing power of a projector’s maser beams might be deflected long enough for the ships to perform an emergency jump. Lightly-protected ships like frigates would be no match for the power of a projector, but a Kristang destroyer might survive long enough to jump to safety. And a cruiser or battlecruiser could potentially defect even two shots before being forced to jump away. With only four projectors to work with, we couldn’t afford to use two projectors on one ship.

  Fortunately, we had the laws of physics on our side. Ships not engaged in battle could not maintain their shields at full power all the time. Defensive shields drained a significant amount of power from a ship’s reactor; in the case of a small ship like a frigate, the ship had to decrease shield power temporarily in order to fire its maser cannon. Shield generators also wore out and became polarized from long-term use, so the Kristang ships around Paradise had their ships in low-power mode to protect the ships only from being struck by space debris. Since shield generators could be brought to full power in seconds, and a ship would be warned of Ruhar ships attacking by the tell-tale gamma ray burst, the Kristang felt safe leaving their shields at low power. And that meant their ships in the skies above Paradise were sitting ducks.

  All four projectors fired simultaneously to maximize the surprise. Two of the maser cannons had clear skies above; another had high, thin cloud cover that was no obstacle to the maser projecting its full power above the atmosphere. The fourth projector was somewhat unlucky; it was under a heavy layer of cloud cover, but at least the clouds were not pouring down rain.

  The heavy layer of clouds was no match for that maser cannon; it had been designed to shoot through clouds. Its initial shot was a rapid series of lower-powered pulses that lanced up through the clouds, the searing heat of the maser pulses boiling away the water vapor and leaving a brief, narrow clear
channel all the way up through the cloud. Half a millisecond later the maser put out its full power into the clear tunnel of air, striking a Kristang destroyer. The projector followed a shoot-shoot-look pattern, with two full power shots followed by a lower-power maser scan of the target. Satisfied that the Kristang destroyer was now a wreck, the projector shifted its aim to a second target, first shooting a rapid series of pulses to knock aside the clouds in that direction.

  The very first target struck in the engagement was the command ship, the battlecruiser He Who Pushes Aside Fear Shall Always be Victorious. The maser cannon that targeted that ship, a maser shooting up through a crystal clear sky, did not care if the ship’s crew pushed aside fear or not. It also followed a standard shoot-shoot-look pattern. The first pulse lasted 0.2 milliseconds and sliced through the unprotected ship’s hull. With the Victorious moving at nearly 3 kilometers per second, the maser beam did not need to move its aim; the ship did the work of cutting itself almost in half as it moved through the path of the maser bolt. One area the first maser pulse burned through was a missile magazine that was the projector’s primary target. Five missiles exploded, sending shrapnel in every direction and rupturing the ship’s hull from inside. That first maser shot would have been enough to turn the Victorious from a powerful warship into a drifting hulk, but the projector was not finished. Shrapnel from the exploding missiles had not even time to reach the aft of the ship, when the second maser pulse of the shoot-shoot-look pattern targeted the battlecruiser’s reactor, and an instant later a brief new sun shone in the sky high above Paradise. When the maser shifted into its lower-powered look mode, the largest piece of organized matter where the Victorious had been was about the size of a dropship.