Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  After Commodore Ferlant destroyed their pursuit force, the Kristang tried to chase his ships around the system, but both sides knew the situation had become a stalemate. On the ground, Major Perkins and her team had managed to activate a total of seven projectors, before we turned the process over to the Ruhar planetary government. The Kristang had also been busy activating projectors, and attempting to capture or destroy projectors controlled by the Ruhar. It had become a bloody ground war, with both sides having few aircraft left to throw into the fight. Five days after Ferlant destroyed the pursuit force, the Ruhar government offered a new cease fire to Admiral Kekrando. It took him a day, and probably a lot of alcohol or whatever lizards drink, to swallow the bitter terms and accept the offer.

  The new cease fire terms prevented either side from having ships in orbit; but with both sides now controlling deadly projectors, neither commander wanted to risk his ships anywhere near the planet. Both sides ceased activity to activate additional projectors; there was of course some cheating on both sides but it was surprisingly minor. The Ruhar had an advantage in active projectors. The Kristang had plenty of projectors under their control, which Skippy was unable to mess with, because the Kristang were using manual controls.

  The real reason that the Kristang had agreed to another cease fire, was the same reason they had offered the first cease fire. After all the fighting and deaths on both sides, the Ruhar federal government still intended to trade the planet for something better. The negotiations were now no longer a secret; all the native Ruhar knew, and they all protested, and they all accomplished nothing.

  Everything we had done; activating secret, long-dormant projectors and blasting a Kristang battlegroup out of the sky, had been to bring the situation back to where it was before Admiral Kekrando’s battlegroup had arrived to take control of the space around Paradise.

  Which meant we still had the same problem; the Ruhar did not want to keep a relatively isolated, agricultural planet. All we had done was drive up the price they could ask the Kristang in return.

  So far, we hadn’t done anything to actually help UNEF.

  Flying Dutchman

  “Welcome back, Colonel Bishop,” Major Smythe greeted me with a crisp salute as I stepped out of the dropship.

  “It’s good to be back, Major,” I replied. It was good to be back aboard our pirate ship, it felt like home. “Have you been busy?” I asked that as a joke, knowing Smythe would have kept his SpecOps people training full time.

  “Oh, no, Sir,” he said with a straight face. “With you on Paradise doing all the work, we’ve been on vacation. Sleeping late, and having afternoon tea with crumpets.”

  “Sounds good. What’s a crumpet?”

  “I think you Americans would say that it is like a thick sort of pancake, only it’s round.”

  “All pancakes are round,” I said, confused. Except when my father made them when we went camping, and he forgot to bring a spatula to flip them. In that case he pushed the half-cooked mess around with a spoon to make ‘scrambled pancakes’. They were not super yummy.

  “These are perfectly round, Sir,” he made a circle with his hands. “The batter is poured into a ring on the griddle, so it stays round.”

  “Oh,” I brightened, “like an Egg McMuffin.”

  “I wouldn’t know, Sir,” he replied, unintentionally making me feel like an idiot. “Successful mission, Sir? The cease fire is back in effect, but now the Ruhar have complete control of the planet.”

  “Partially successful, Major. The Ruhar government still intends to trade the planet to the highest bidder. All we have accomplished so far is to drive up the price the Ruhar can get. They won’t even need to throw in floormats or rustproofing. And we have no plan for how to prevent the Ruhar from selling the planet out from under UNEF’s feet.”

  “I’m sure we’ll think of something, Sir,” he said, looking at me in a way that made it clear he expected me to come up with an idea. “We always do.”

  “Right now, Major, what I have is a whole lot of nothing.”

  On the way to report to Chotek, I stopped by the science lab, to check on what our group of geniuses had been doing while I had been stirring up trouble on Paradise. Dr. Sarah Rose and two others were working on some complicated piece of machinery, whose purpose I couldn’t even guess at. Our resident rocket scientist Dr. Friedlander was sitting at a desk, doing something on a laptop. “Are you working on a design for a better jump drive?” I asked.

  He turned his laptop around so I could see the screen. “No, I’m doing Sudoku while I give my brain a rest. It used to be that we’d get a break while a supercomputer took hours to run a simulation for us, but here Skippy has the simulations done before we hit the ‘Enter’ key. Then Skippy tells us what we did wrong with programming the simulation parameters, but he won’t fix it for us.”

  “You monkeys won’t learn anything if I do the work for you,” Skippy said through Friedlander’s laptop speakers.

  “Yes,” Friedlander said, “he keeps telling us that. He will tell us we got something wrong, but he won’t tell us what is wrong, or how to fix it.” He flipped a finger at the laptop’s camera. It wasn’t his index finger.

  “I saw that!” Skippy laughed. “Dr. Friedlander, just think of how proud you will be of your accomplishments, when you figure out how something works on your own. And, hey, you almost are able to understand how Thuranin doorknobs work.”

  “Skippy,” I retorted, “that wasn’t funny. These people-”

  “He wasn’t joking,” Friedlander said as he shook his head sadly. “The manual door latch mechanism uses a magnetic catch, but it appears to be pure energy. There’s no physical magnet that we can see, so we don’t know what generates the magnetic field.”

  “Are you making any progress?” I asked hopefully. If the science team could bring back useful insights into Thuranin or even Kristang technology, UNEF Command would consider this mission a great success. But our team of geniuses didn’t know how a doorknob functioned? That was not encouraging.

  “Not yet,” Friedlander admitted. “That was a nice way of saying no, we have not made any measurable progress. This trip has not been entirely useless so far. We have been able to invalidate some ideas we developed during the last mission. And from what we have observed during jumps, we are certain that our current theories of quantum mechanics are wrong. Technically, instead of adding to humanity’s base of knowledge, we are subtracting from it.”

  “There, see?” Skippy said cheerily. “Look at how clever you monkeys are!”

  “That is not helping, Skippy,” I said, known that helping wasn’t part of Skippy’s plan. “Seriously, you can’t give us a hint about a freakin’ doorknob?”

  “Nope. Well, here’s a hint. If you can figure out the doorknob, you’ll be a step closer to understanding our reactor containment system. And, I shouldn’t be saying this, our defensive energy shields.”

  “Reactors?” I asked. “How about the reactors?”

  “No,” Friedlander said dejectedly. “Same with the jump drive, the stealth field, artificial gravity, you name it. Colonel, everything on this ship is beyond our understanding.”

  “So far,” I said as encouragement.

  “So far.

  Chotek let out a long breath and ran a hand through his hair, in a combination of frustration and fatigue. We all felt like he did. “Colonel Bishop, this operation has been entirely successful so far, congratulations to you and your team.” Before I could respond, he added. “Now we are back to the original problem; the Ruhar still intend to give up this planet through a negotiated settlement. All we appear to have accomplished is strengthening the negotiating position of the Ruhar; the Kristang will have to offer more valuable territory in exchange for Paradise. I could cling to the hope that the Kristang are not able to deliver a price the Ruhar will find acceptable, however we know the Ruhar do not want this planet at all. The Ruhar desire to get rid of Paradise, the only question is what kind of bar
gain they get for it.”

  What an asshole, I thought. He could have paused one freakin’ minute after praising the Merry Band of Pirates; given me time to pass on the mission commander’s congratulations to the whole crew. Or better yet, he could have done it himself. Instead, he soured a nice moment by moving directly on to the next problem. Some people have absolutely no sense of timing. “Sir,” I said, trying to keep the irritation from my voice and losing that struggle, “before, we did not have any opportunity to affect the outcome here. The Kristang had control of the planet and the Ruhar weren’t willing to commit the resources necessary to dislodge them. Now, we could potentially give the Ruhar a reason to retain Paradise under their control.”

  “How?” Chotek asked simply. “How can we do that, without exposing our involvement? We also need to return to the relay station, in order to complete our primary mission,” he reminded me needlessly.

  “As of this moment we do not have a working plan to ensure the Ruhar keep control of Paradise. With the operation on Paradise completed, we can move on to planning the next phase; until now we haven’t had the time to think about it.”

  “Do you have any ideas? Any at all?”

  “Sir, I would rather not discuss potential options until I have had time to review them with my team for feasibility,” I said truthfully. What I did not say was that I had zero ideas right then. I also did not mention my pride in knowing the word ‘feasibility’ that had been on an officer training PowerPoint slide; I’d had to look up the definition because I had no clue what ‘feasibility’ meant at the time. Hmm. If something could be ‘feasible’ did that mean ‘fease’ was a verb? How would you ‘fease’? I would look that up later. “We do not have to depart for the relay station immediately, I request five days here to develop plans.”

  “Three days, Colonel,” Chotek replied. “Every day we are away from the relay station jeopardizes our primary mission. I am concerned the situation there may have changed during our absence. With the fluid military situation in this sector between the Thuranin and Jeraptha, the crew rotation schedule may have changed. Or a damaged warship may have stopped at the station to facilitate repairs. For all we know, the Jeraptha might have forced the Thuranin away from the area and captured that station. While we remain here considering options to secure the safety of humans on Paradise, we risk the safety of humans on Earth.”

  He was right, and I couldn’t argue with him about it. “Three days. Yes, sir.”

  To get my brain going, I went to the gym for a hard workout, then took a quick shower and went to my office. While I was in the gym, I had been kicking ideas around in my head, and listening to ideas from the SpecOps commanders including Major Smythe. “Skippy,” I said as I slumped in my chair. My legs were rubbery from exercise. “We have some ideas I want to discuss with you.”

  “Of course you do,” he sighed. “Another shining opportunity for monkeys to be smarter than me. Go ahead, make me look like an idiot again. I’ve been working on the problem of getting the Ruhar to retain Paradise, and so far I got nothing. Nothing! With all my ginormous brain power, I can’t think of a solution. What’s going to happen is your stupid meat-based monkey brain is going to say ‘duh what about this’ and solve the whole freakin’ problem. Damn, I hate you. I hate my life.”

  “Skippy, we don’t dream up ideas to make you feel like an idiot-”

  “Thank you, Joe.”

  “-that’s just a delicious bonus.”

  “Thus reminding me why I so very much hate you, Joe.”

  “Hey, I’d love for you to solve all our problems for us,” I admitted. “That way, UNEF Command could bust your balls about every freakin’ decision you make, instead of mine. Since you can’t think up solutions to every problem, we humans have to step up.”

  “Your species is maddeningly clever, especially you, Joe. I speculate that when you don’t have big teeth or claws and can’t fly, the only way your species avoided being eaten by leopards is by becoming clever. Anyway,” he sighed again, “go ahead. Tell me your brilliant, clever, innovative monkey-brained idea and let’s get my humiliation over with, shall we?”

  “Skippy,” I wanted to discuss ideas with him but needed to satisfy my curiosity first. “Why is it that every time we think up an idea you couldn’t, you act like it’s the first time it’s ever happened? You must be used to it by now.”

  “That is not entirely my fault, Joe. In my matrix is a processor that keeps track of time and events; as you may have noticed my occasional absent-mindedness-”

  “Ocassional? Occasional?”

  He ignored me. “-this processor is perhaps not functioning optimally. The truth is, this processor simply cannot believe any of you lesser beings could be smarter than me about anything. It can’t happen, therefore my processor assumes that the data input is garbled, or that I am hallucinating. In order to acknowledge you having any kind of a good idea, I have to manually override this processor. So, emotionally, it is new to me each time.”

  “Wow. I’m sorry that-”

  “Also, on my time scale, so much time passes between you having a good idea that it is an exceedingly rare occurrence. Like, every couple hundred million years, an asteroid crashes into Earth. But that kind of thing is not in a typical five day forecast, you know?”

  “The one constant is that you are an asshole.”

  “Yes! See, Joe,” he said happily, “there is order in the universe. So, getting back to the subject, what moronic ideas do you wish to waste my time with?”

  “Moronic? Did you already forget the conversation we just had about how clever monkeys are?”

  “Sometimes. How clever monkeys sometimes are. Rarely. Go ahead, hit me with your best shot, Joey my boy.”

  “All right. The Ruhar used to want this planet, before the wormhole shift made access to Paradise impractical for them. Now the wormhole that connects to Ruhar territory is far away, while the wormhole that connects to Kristang territory is closer. Our question is this; can you use your magic beanstalk,” I meant the Elder wormhole controller module in one of our cargo bays, “to reset the wormhole connections back to the way they used to be? Or maybe just cut off the Kristang wormhole, so they no longer want Paradise?”

  “Hmm. Ok, Ok, that is not an astronomically stupid question,” he said with an undertone of surprise. “I assume you lead off with your best idea, and they will only grow progressively moronic from here. That was not a totally stupid question, but the answer is no. No on many, many levels, Joe. First, if I shut down another wormhole, someone is going to quickly grow very suspicious that wormholes mysteriously shut down, near the only two planets in the galaxy that are occupied by humans.”

  “Crap. Ok, I had considered that problem.”

  “Then there is the larger issue that the more I screw with wormhole connections, the greater risk there is that we could trigger an unpredictable cascade of wormhole shifts. That wormhole controller module allows me to adjust one wormhole at a time, I can’t use it to change the parameters of the underlying wormhole network. Joe, I can very temporarily change the connection of one wormhole, as long as it goes right back to its baseline program shortly. A permanent change risks the network deciding to institute a major shift that might be very bad for humanity. A major shift could bring that wormhole near Earth back to life.”

  “You never mentioned that!” I protested. “Crap!”

  “That is an unlikely possibility, Joe, as long as we do not screw further with the network. There is worse news; that wormhole we shut down is not actually the closest one to Earth. There is another dormant wormhole much closer to Earth; that closer wormhole has not been active for millions of years. If we screw with wormholes, the network might decide to wake that closer wormhole from its dormancy. So, while I could play with the Paradise wormholes to persuade the Ruhar keep this planet, that would be an extremely risky idea.”

  “Damn. That was the easiest idea we had.”

  “Easiest? You think adjusting
an Elder wormhole is easy?”

  “Easy for us, Skippy. You do all the work.”

  “Fair enough, I guess. What other ideas do you have?”

  “Our second idea probably won’t work either. We thought that whatever planet the Kristang are offering to trade for Paradise, we could cut off wormhole access to it. Then the Ruhar wouldn’t want to make the trade. But now I see that won’t work.”

  “Nope, it won’t work; same problem of potentially triggering a cascading wormhole shift. That idea is even worse, Joe. If we cut off access to one planet the Kristang are offering to trade, they could then offer another planet, and we’d have to cut off access to that one also. Man, the Maxolhx and Rindhalu would get super suspicious right away about a series of wormholes shutting down. One wormhole shutting down is an isolated anomaly. A series of wormholes going dead is a pattern. The Rindhalu and Maxolhx are smart, and they have reasonable smart AIs. A pattern will attract their interest. You do not want to get those senior species involved in any way, Joe.”

  “Yeah, I figured that. Crap. Then, our third idea is, no, that won’t work either. Damn it. How can we get the Kristang to not take over Paradise, when the Ruhar are eager to hand it to them?”

  “Stupid hamsters,” Skippy grumbled. “The only truly valuable thing on the whole planet was me, and the Ruhar stuck me on a dusty shelf. Serves them right for-”

  Just like that, BAM! An idea came into my head. “Oh, wow. I just had an idea.”

  Skippy chuckled. “Worse than your other ideas that we just discarded?”

  “Better. We’ve been thinking of ways to make the Ruhar decide that giving up Paradise isn’t worth the deal, even though they really don’t want the planet anymore. What if instead, we found a way to make them want to keep Paradise? Make them really, really want to keep it?”

  “How? The whole planet is a farm, Joe. What are we going to do, grow an extra super prize-winning pumpkin or something?” He laughed.