Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Remorselessly, the projector shifted to the second in the list of targets it had been given by an alien AI. Less than a second later, that target also exploded because a direct maser hit to the ship’s jump drive capacitors released that stored energy.

  The maser projector then changed aim to a third target, automatically calculating how much energy from its rapidly draining capacitors would be needed for the shot.

  “Done!” Skippy shouted triumphantly a few seconds later. “Scratch twelve targets! Damn, I am good! We may be able to hit another ship in a couple seconds, it’s at a bad angle right now, but in a few- No, damn it, the stupid thing just jumped away. Oh, well, you can’t have everything. Joe, tell me the truth, am I awesome, or am I awesome?”

  “Between those two excellent choices, I will choose awesome, Skippy. I would have celebrated your awesome awesomeness without prompting. And you are not just good, you are the best. The best ever. How could any being be more awesome than you?” Ok, maybe I was laying the praise on a little thick.

  “I will accept your praise graciously, woefully inadequate though it is. You are doing the best your puny monkey brain can do to marvel at my awesomeness.”

  I had to laugh. “You are such an asshole sometimes. But I love you anyway.”

  “And I find you mostly almost tolerable, Joe.”

  “I appreciate that. You got a sitrep for us?”

  “Affirmative on the sitrep, Colonel,” Skippy said in a sarcastic tone. He hated military acronyms. “We hit fourteen ships, and all fourteen ships were completely destroyed. That includes theie battlecruiser and both cruisers. Only two ships even had time to start charging their defensive shield projectors, and that didn’t do them any good. It would be easier to list which ships the Kristang have left, than to the list the ones we destroyed.”

  “Understood, go ahead.”

  “The Kristang have ten warships remaining; five destroyers and five frigates. On the Ruhar side, the ships are that combat ready are one cruiser, three destroyers and two frigates. That cruiser would seem to give the Ruhar a slight advantage, but the Kristang design philosophy for destroyers makes them more like the equivalent of a Ruhar light cruiser. The Kristang still have the advantage of combat power.”

  “Yeah, but we have the projectors,” I reminded him.

  “Two of those projectors are now almost depleted, Joe. Their remaining power is inadequate to penetrate the shields of a starship, even if we fired both of those projectors at the same target. Each of the other two healthy projectors are capable of one shot each; they could destroy a ship if we fired both at the same target. Unfortunately, those two projectors are poorly positioned to hit the same target; the enemy ship would need to be within a very small slice of the sky for the projectors to have line of sight to it. That won’t happen, because now that the enemy knows where at least four of our projectors are, their ships will avoid the space covered by them.”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking at Adams, “we need to get Perkins working on activating that other projector as soon as she can. Those Kristang ships are sure to test whether those four projectors are the only ones active. If we can fire another projector, the Kristang will assume we have capabilities we haven’t revealed yet. If they jump in and we can’t shoot at them, they’ll know that we’re bluffing, and then we’ll be in deep shit real quick. Skippy, can you provide cover for Perkins if her team needs to work fast? We can’t let them wait for night.”

  “Affirmative, Joe. Without the prying eyes of starships overhead, I can conceal Major Perkins’ Buzzard from being detected, unless someone happens to eyeball them while they are digging. And when they are done and need to fly away, I can give the pilot a route for maximum concealment. They do still have the problem of needing to refuel before they can reach the next projector site. Joe, I do not think we will have much trouble concealing the actions of a lone Buzzard.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because, Joe, very soon I expect the skies over Paradise to be filled with Ruhar and Kristang aircraft, fighting the biggest air battle in several hundred years. The Kristang landed over three hundred aircraft, plus they captured additional Ruhar aircraft when they took over territory under terms of the cease fire. The Ruhar have almost six hundred aircraft, but they have a civilian population to protect, and more of their aircraft are unarmed civilian transports. Without starships overhead, those aircraft are the best way to establish control over the surface of Paradise. We should expect- Yes. Joe, the Kristang just launched a wave of dropships and aircraft in an attack on two Ruhar airbases. The Ruhar have detected the launch and are scrambling aircraft to intercept. This is going to get ugly very quickly.”

  Saily Chernandagren walked out of the hangar toward her Dobreh fighter. The aircraft she would be flying that day was ‘hers’, which wasn’t always the case given how often high-performance Dobrehs needed to go off the flight line for maintenance. That day, her mission was a simple check ride, to test a thruster unit that had been replaced. It should be a simple, relatively short flight. Although it was only a short flight, the Dobreh was fully armed with missiles; while Kristang were still on and above the planet they were technically at war. Neither Saily nor any other Ruhar trusted the Kristang to adhere to the cease fire agreement.

  “Your pet wants a cookie,” Juff Blander said sourly, pointing at Derek Bonsu, who was opening an access cover. The human, too eager to please, always opened the access covers so that pilots could perform their preflight inspections faster. Juff was Saily’s copilot and Weapon Systems Officer, who sat in the back seat of the Dobreh.

  “He’s not my pet,” Saily protested, knowing her words were falling on deaf ears. Her Wizzo had nothing personal against Derek; Jeff simply did not like humans, any humans. Like Saily, Juff was a native to Gehtanu; his family on both sides had been on Gehtanu for three generations. His entire family had been forcibly evacuated by the humans. Juff had been scheduled to join them on the trip up the space elevator in little over a month, when the Ruhar fleet arrived and took the planet back. “You shouldn’t be mean to him. We may be leaving this planet if the Kristang stay here, but he is going to die,” she said sadly.

  “They are not my problem,” Jeff said angrily. “They came here with the Kristang.” He stared at the human, his anger softening. The pilot was right; if the Kristang kept Gehtanu, the humans eventually would suffer a terrible fate. “Saily, this is just a check ride,” Juff commented, “take him instead.”

  “Are you sure?” Saily asked, surprised.

  “Yes.” There was an increasing volume of rumors that the Ruhar federal government was not sending the fleet to fight the Kristang; that Gehtanu was not important enough to fight for. If that rumor was true, Derek Bonsu did not have much longer to live. The human had actively assisted the Ruhar, helped to maintain their combat aircraft. The Kristang would find that to be an unforgivable betrayal, and the thin-skinned Kristang never forgave any slight, no matter how minor. “This may be his last opportunity to fly. Go,” he urged, “before I change my mind.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  “Your aircraft,” Saily announced, releasing the controls. The Dobreh was on autopilot, cruising at only fifteen thousand meters altitude as measured by humans. Every system had operated perfectly in the flight, including the replacement thruster unit. The only way to test the thruster to its full capabilities was at high altitude, up where the air was so thin that thrusters were needed to control the gunship’s flight. “Take us up.”

  “Yes Ma’am,” Derek acknowledged as he deactivated the autopilot, and set the controls for the airspeed and attitude that allowed a maximum climb rate. The Dobreh zoomed toward the upper edge of the atmosphere, where its engines strained to gulp in enough air to keep the aircraft aloft. Soon, the wings began to lose lift and Derek needed to push the nose down to maintain airspeed, or the thin air flowing over the wings would cause a stall. A Dobreh could hover at up to twenty thousand meters; already he had the engine pods pointed do
wn slightly so their thrust helped keep the gunship aloft. “Losing roll control,” Derek reported as the wings began to wobble. He had not been this high, other than in a simulator, for over a year. The Ruhar aircraft flew like a dream; the controls were light and responsive. The ship did everything he asked of it and told him there was more, so much more that it could do and was eager to do. Even at this extreme altitude with the engines straining, when he touched the throttle, he could feel there was reserve power he had not used yet. If he had not been concentrating so hard on the instruments, he would have had a moment to realize this was the happiest he had been in months.

  Coming to Paradise, once something Derek had burned with patriotic fervor to do, had become a nightmare. UNEF was trapped, not even the Kristang had access to Earth. The Expeditionary Force were all prisoners of war, forced to grow their own food. Their ‘allies’ the Kristang had been revealed to be cruel deceivers, caring only about using UNEF and enslaving humanity. Duty for UNEF was now all about survival on a planet with the Ruhar in charge. Now the Kristang were back, and survival might not be possible. If Derek had stopped to think about that, he would plunge into despair. So he thought only of how joyous it was to fly this powerful alien fighter aircraft, high above an alien planet.

  The roll was getting worse. A Ruhar pilot, with their genetically-enhanced reflexes, might have been able to keep ahead of the aircraft’s shuddering, but Derek needed help to halt the rolling tendency before it snapped the Dobreh over on its back. He consoled himself with the thought that the purpose of going this high was to test the thruster unit, which he now needed. “Engaging thrusters to stabilize.”

  Saily looked at her instruments to monitor the performance of the new thruster unit, which was not actually new. It was a rebuilt unit that had been recovered from a Dobreh shot down by her own people, back when a human had been flying the doomed aircraft and the Ruhar fleet came back to retake control of the planet. She would have preferred a truly new thruster unit, but of course spare parts were no longer being shipped to Gehtanu. The thruster was operating perfectly, and Derek had confident control of the aircraft, so she took her eyes away from the instruments for a glance out the canopy.

  Up this high, the sky above was black, and the curve of the planet below was noticeable. It looked so peaceful; the land to the north so green, the ocean below them so blue, the cloud tops so brilliantly white. Above, her eyes caught sunlight reflecting off something, and she blinked to enhance the vision in her helmet visor. A Kristang ship. A big one. The image wobbled enough that she couldn’t quite tell if that ship above her was the battlegroup’s command ship, but she thought that likely. If she wanted, she could have viewed the image from one of the Dobreh’s cameras, but she did not care to see the enemy ship that closely. Her eyes turned back to the instruments, so she missed by a microsecond the intense white flare coming up from the planet’s surface. She knew that she shouldn’t look toward a maser beam, but her instincts made her look briefly before her training took over. So she didn’t miss the projector’s second shot. Or the even brighter fireball of that Kristang cruiser exploding.

  “Engage stealth,” Saily ordered calmly as she was momentarily blinded by the intense light of the maser burning its way up through clouds. “Take us down on the deck.”

  Derek did not hesitate. He had not seen the initial maser shot, but caught the second beam out of the corner of his eye. Immediately, he had closed his eyes and looked away, so his vision was unaffected. The first thing he did was activate the stealth field, and the bright sunlight coming in through the canopy disappeared, as a curtain of darkness draped over the aircraft. From now on, he would be flying entirely on instruments, which did not bother him. When the stealth field had been powered up, long thin wires had extended from each wingtip and the tail. The ends of the wires peeked out beyond the stealth field and provided sensor data. The canopy automatically switched over to provide a view, a composite image of what the sensors said were outside.

  He did not make the mistake of reducing power for at that altitude, the Dobreh would have stalled and gone into a spin. Thrusters could have recovered from the spin, which the aircraft would have done automatically, but with a shooting war going on above his head, Derek had been trained to reserve thruster fuel. He pointed the Dobreh’s nose down and felt his body moving upward against the seat straps as the gunship hit the top of the arc, and he was momentarily weightless. Then the sensation of weight gradually returned and he concentrated on keeping airspeed to Vst, the speed for maximum stealth. He had to run the engines at almost minimum power and monitor airflow over the wings so the Dobreh passed through the atmosphere as smoothly as possible. The problem with using stealth in an atmosphere was that enemy sensors could track him by the warm, roiling air behind the Dobreh. If he had to engage in air combat, stealth would be almost a liability; the engines would be putting out enough heat and turbulent air that he might as well hold up a sign saying ‘shoot me’.

  With the aircraft in a stable descent trimmed for optimal stealth, Derek had time to scan the sensors and assess the situation. He had just turned his attention to the tactical display when another Kristang ship overhead exploded. Or a piece of a ship had exploded, because he could run the display back and see that ship had been struck by a powerful maser beam in the initial strike. Stunned, Derek toggled the display back and expanded the coverage for a wider area. He gasped with shock when he saw what the sensor data revealed. The Kristang battlegroup in orbit had been hit hard by four powerful maser cannons on the surface. Maser cannons.

  “You’re hit the Kristang! Yeah!” Derek shouted and pumped a fist toward the canopy. “Thank you!”

  “That wasn’t us,” Saily responded tersely. It was the first words they had exchanged since the attack began. She had been monitoring the sensors and communicating with the airbase to find out the in the hell was going on. No one had answers; Ruhar command appeared to be as surprised as anyone. “We don’t have projectors like that. If we did, we would have used them when the Kristang were raiding us.”

  “Not you? Then, who?” Derek asked, completely confused. “It’s not us is it? UNEF?”

  “No, not humans either. I do not know what is going on. Cut the chatter,” she ordered.

  Derek cut the chatter and turned his focus back to the sensors. He suddenly realized that since the start of the crisis, Saily had trusted him with complete control of the aircraft, her aircraft.

  “We’ve been ordered to return to base,” Saily announced.

  “On course,” Derek acknowledged. He had assumed that was where Saily wanted to go so they were already flying in that direction. The check ride was clearly over.

  Saily must have been happy with his flying, because she didn’t say anything to him for several minutes. Still flying with maximum stealth, they crossed the shore and were now over land. At their present slow airspeed, the base was forty seven minutes away. Derek checked status of the weapons, which Saily had not enabled yet. As a human, Derek knew he was not trusted with weapons. They would return to the airbase and Saily would likely be reprimanded for flying with an unauthorized weapon system officer. Derek’s flying days would be over; it was likely he would soon find himself tending crops in Lemuria.

  And he did not care. The Kristang battlegroup was gone; with many of their ships obliterated by powerful maser cannons, they would think very carefully about approaching the planet again. They were free! Humans were free! Or at least free to be prisoner of war under the Ruhar. Derek no longer felt a constant fear of a Kristang sword hanging over his neck. No matter what else happened, they-

  “My aircraft,” Saily said curtly, and the control stick went slack in Derek’s hand.

  “Roger that,” he replied, and mentally switched back to Wizzo mode.

  Since the main battlegroup had arrived to take control over Pradassis, the Swift Arrow clan frigate To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious had been relieved of her dangerous raiding duties, because there were to be no m
ore raids. A cease fire was in effect, a cease fire with generous conditions that had shocked the crew of the Glory when they heard about it. Why Admiral Kekrando had made so many concessions to an enemy whose position was so weak, almost no one in his battlegroup could understand. Kekrando had sent a message to all ships, that he was following strict instructions from clan leadership. The clan leaders strongly desired a negotiated agreement for the cowardly and treacherous Ruhar to leave Pradassis, Kekrando had explained, his voice almost choking with outraged disgust as he read the words. Unsaid, but implied, was that the Swift Arrow clan’s resources were stretched very thin at the moment. With the prospect of a civil war within the Kristang looming, the clan could not afford to support a protracted battle for Pradassis. The cowardly Ruhar civilian government had already agreed to the concept of abandoning, surrendering, the world their military had fought very hard for. All that remained was for the two sides to agree to a price, and now that Kekrando’s powerful battlegroup had established total supremacy in the space on and around Pradassis, the Swift Arrow leaders were confident they could ultimately get the entire planet for a cheap price.

  The question of why the Swift Arrow clan wanted a world whose chief product was grain had never been stated. Most of the warriors in the battlegroup had never been to the backwater world of Pradassis before, and what they saw was not impressive. Looking down at a world dotted here and there with the parallel stripes of agricultural fields, most of the ship’s crews considered that the real reason they had been sent on a one-way mission was to uphold the honor of their clan and their entire species. Because there was no other conceivable reason why the clan leadership had sent so much of the clan’s precious combat power to such an unimportant planet. The clan leadership was wise, Kekrando had stated in an unconvincing tone; the brave warriors of the battlegroup needed to have faith in their leadership, and concentrate on executing their mission to the greater honor and credit of the clan.