Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Oh my God.

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe for a moment.

  Skippy had been behind everything, right from the beginning. “This is all your fault?!”

  “Hey, it wasn’t all my doing, Joe. I didn’t cause the wormhole shift that gave the Kristang access to your home planet. And I didn’t give them the idea to invade your worthless mudball of a planet; I only found out about that from the Ruhar after the Kristang were already on Earth. At that point I figured, what the hell? Why not see if I can make some good for me come out of it? It worked out great for humanity, so good times all around, huh?”

  “Good times?!” I exploded. “You underhanded, sneaky, untrustworthy-”

  “That hurt, Joe. It did work out well for humanity. If I had not manipulated events so that the Kristang brought humans to Paradise, the Kristang would still have control of Earth and your species would be enslaved. And quite possibly subjected to genocide by the Kristang. As it is, now Earth is safe. For now. If events had transpired any other way, your species right now would be on a path for cultural or even biological extinction. Truthfully, if you think about it, humanity owes me big time for bringing humans to Paradise.”

  Crap.

  Double crap!

  He was right. After the Kristang arrived at Earth, the only thing that had saved us from enslavement and slow extinction was Skippy using humanity for his own purposes. “Are there any other mind-blowing revelations you care to share with me, Skippy? Because that is one giant Goddamn ‘by the way’ from you.”

  “None that I care to share, nope,” he said like a stubborn child. “Your blood pressure is abnormally high for you, Joe.”

  “Ya think? Damn it, Skippy. Do you have any idea what a revelation like that would do if UNEF Command heard about it? They already don’t trust you.”

  “I am sorry that your Expeditionary Force is stuck on Paradise, but that wasn’t my doing, Joe.”

  “Do not tell anyone else about this.”

  “If it is such a big deal, Joe, I won’t tell anyone,” he said defensively.

  “Believe me, it is a big, a huge freakin’ deal.” Another chilling thought hit me. “You are not still manipulating us behind the scenes, are you?”

  “Not that you know of, Joe.”

  “That was not funny, Skippy.”

  “Sorry. You are aware that the reason I am helping you fly the Dutchman is for my own purposes, so clearly you understand that I am manipulating you in that way.”

  “We know about that, Skippy, and we agree with our terms. What we do not like is being manipulated without knowing about it.”

  “Well, then,” Skippy paused. “I can tell you this; if I am still pulling strings from behind the scenes, it is nowhere near the scope of what I did previously. And that worked out pretty well for you and your species.”

  Knowing that sneaky little beer can, that was the best assurance he was going to ever give me. Major Smythe called me right then, to get ready for another practice zero gee maneuver. I almost told Smythe that my head wasn’t in the game at the moment, but I tried to push Skippy’s shocking revelation to the back of my mind and got to my feet. Being somewhat distracted was perfect conditions to train for focusing my mind on combat maneuvers. In actual combat, with people shooting at me, there would be a whole lot of distractions.

  Unbelievable. Maybe I shouldn’t ask Skippy questions unless I was prepared to hear an answer I didn’t like.

  “Colonel Joe,” Skippy said to me while I was in my office, “once again, I must commend you for the idea of planting an Elder power tap on Paradise. Finding such a device there would certainly provide a reason for the Ruhar to retain control of the planet. There is one teensy weensy, nagging little problem with your idea.”

  “What’s that, Skippy?” I asked.

  “That there is no way for us to go and simply get an Elder power tap, you moron! Damn, do you ever once stop to think of whether your ideas are in any way practical, Joe? You dream up stuff and I get stuck trying to make it work.”

  “I’m more of a big picture guy, Skippy. You see, colonels like me have people to handle the little details. Handle it, Skippy,” I said with a dismissive flick of a wrist.

  “What? Oh my- Unbelievable!” Skippy sputtered. “Did you just wrist flick me? You had better not have treated me like a-”

  “I was jerking your chain, Skippy. Don’t take it so personally. I’ll be serious now. Explain why we can’t go looking for an Elder power tap? I know it may take a while, and that we need to make it quick before the Ruhar reach a deal with the Kristang. On our last mission, we went searching for Elder comm nodes.”

  “Uh huh, and did we find any comm nodes? No. The only comm node we found was the one the Kristang had dug up on Newark. What we did find along the way was a Thuranin ambush. Or did you forget that?”

  “No, I did not forget any of that. We didn’t search very many Elder sites, Skippy. We got interrupted by the ambush, then we abandoned the original mission when we learned that the Thuranin were sending a ship to Earth. We did not check enough Elder sites to make a, what would you call it? A statistically significant sample?”

  “Joe?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you just attempt to talk math with me?”

  I assume he meant the statistics stuff. “Maybe?”

  “Don’t do that. Please, do not ever do that again. It’s embarrassing. To you.”

  Feeling mildly insulted, I agreed so he would drop the subject. “Fine. Was I right anyway?”

  “That we didn’t look at enough supposedly undiscovered Elder sites to determine whether continuing to search for such sites would be worthwhile? You are, incredibly, correct about that. Thus proving that the universe is wondrously strange. Ok, smart guy, I’ll try to explain it to you in somewhat statistical terms. Based on what I know, which is a ginormous amount but still woefully inadequate, for us to find a comm node at an undiscovered Elder site would take approximately three years. That’s assuming we explored potential Elder sites at the same rate we did during the last mission, and that we don’t get ambushed again.”

  “Wow. That’s not good. Power taps are even more rare than comm nodes?”

  “Correct. By comparison, functioning Elder power taps are a numbers-matching Ferrari Daytona convertible, and comm nodes are a typical econobox that you get stuck with as a rental car.”

  “Crap. They’re that rare?”

  “Yes. Perhaps it would help if I show you. Your laptop is now showing all of the known functional Elder power taps in this quadrant of the galaxy.”

  My laptop screen flickered, then popped up a star map. Blinking yellow lights indicated star systems with power taps. There were a lot of them. “Crap, Skippy, I thought you said they were rare?”

  “They are. Joe, that map shows a quarter of the entire galaxy, with millions of habitable star systems. Most of the functional Elder power taps now belong to the Rindhalu, because they had a very long head start on combing the galaxy for Elder gear before the Maxolhx developed interstellar travel capability. Here, look, I’ll eliminate all the Elder power taps that are known to be possessed by both the Rindhalu and the Maxolhx. Since we absolutely do not want to mess with those two.”

  “Oh, that’s for sure. Hmm,” I peered at the map. “That still looks like plenty to me, Skippy.”

  “One thousand, two hundred and sixty six, Joe.”

  “I would call that a target-rich environment.”

  “I would call you an idiot.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Allow me to further refine the search parameters. Now I will eliminate all power taps currently on planets with populations of one hundred million or more. Such planets are heavily defended.”

  “Oooh.” That changed the display. Skippy had added a handy dandy counter at the bottom right of the screen. It showed a total of 83. “Ok, eighty three. We can’t go after any of those because why?”

  “Now I will eliminate from
the display, power taps at military and research installations that are guarded by more than a dozen heavy ships. Ships will combat capabilities greater than that of the Flying Dutchman.”

  The counter now showed zero. Zero. Like, zero. “Crap. There’s no way we can steal one of these things?”

  “That is exactly what both Lt Colonel Chang and Major Smythe said when I discussed this subject with them earlier today.”

  “You already had this discussion?”

  “Of course, Joe. You are not the only person aboard this ship. I also had a very similar talk with Count Chocula yesterday.”

  “Yesterday?” That wasn’t good. I should have thought to ask these questions before the mission commander did.

  “He is, overall, less busy day to day than you are, Joe. Anyway, his conclusion is that your idea of looking for an Elder power tap to plant on Paradise is a wild goose chase.”

  Damn. Chocula might be right about that. I wasn’t giving up that easily. “Fine. That map shows all the known Elder power taps. What if we go trying to find one that has not yet been discovered, like we did with the comm nodes?”

  “We could do that, Joe. My estimate is that we would be searching for four hundred and eight years before we located one. That is longer than the expected remaining life of this ship.”

  Skippy kept reminding me that without access to spare parts, our rebuilt pirate star carrier wasn’t going to last forever. He couldn’t predict how much longer it would be before a critical component failed and we would be stranded in space, because that depended on how far we travelled. We weren’t lugging around heavy starships with us, but we were doing a whole lot of jumping. Most star carriers went into spacedock about every eighteen months for a heavy overhaul; the Dutchman had been almost due for an overhaul when we captured her. Time was running out for our pirate ship. “Damn it, Skippy, there has to be a way to do this. Do you have any suggestions?”

  “I have one suggestion. You should go to the gym.”

  “Why?” I asked, surprised. I was fit; not as fit as the special forces, but I had to be realistic about that.

  “Joe, I have noticed that you seem to develop ideas when you are doing something other than trying to think of an idea. Sometimes we can all be discussing what to do, and the conversation goes off on some tangent, and that gives you an idea. But most often, you get ideas when you are doing something else. I suspect your subconscious mind is much smarter than you are. So, you can go to the gym, or play a silly game on your tablet, or do anything other than trying to think of a way to find a functioning Elder power tap.”

  I took his advice and went to the gym.

  When I walked in the door to the gym, Major Simms was there, waiting. Nine of the ten treadmills were occupied, the tenth one had a piece of yellow tape across it. “The motor is busted,” Simms explained. “Skippy is sending a robot to fix it.”

  Instead of running, I used a rowing machine. While rowing was good exercise, it was not my favorite. Running on a treadmill sucked also; with our rebuilt pirate ship, we could no longer run down the shortened central spine other than short sprints. Keeping fit aboard a starship was not easy. The treadmills aboard the Flying Dutchman were far better now than they were on our first mission. We wore lightweight virtual reality goggles and earphones, they provided a very convincing experience of running pretty much any place you wanted to. With Skippy providing the simulation, we could run the Boston marathon, we could run up any mountain you cared to name, we could race against people on other treadmills. We could even run on Newark, if anyone was feeling nostalgic for that miserable world. Or we could run on our Moon, or some other moon. As much as everyone hated running on a treadmill, it was better than running on a treadmill that was busted. Hopefully Skippy could fix-

  “Sir? Is anything wrong?” Simms asked as I bailed off the rowing machine and quickly walked toward the door.

  “No, Major. I’m hoping everything is going to be great.” To save time, I skipped a shower because I’d only been exercising for a few minutes. And instead of going to Skippy’s escape pod man cave, I went to my office. Fortunately, no one was waiting to speak with me. “Skippy,” I said as I plopped myself into the chair, “you are a genius.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Captain Obvious.”

  “Challenge accepted, Captain Oblivious. There is a treadmill in the gym that has a busted motor.”

  “Correct again, Captain Obvious. I am in the process of replacing the motor with a much better one, but I have to finish building that new motor first. One of my robots will install it tonight. Your SpecOps people are tough on the exercise equipment. We should find an uninhabited planet where they can run and jump and do the kinds of crazy stuff they feel like they need to do.”

  “Skippy, we humans have to exercise. We don’t have the advantage of perfecting our genetics and using cyborg implants and all the cool stuff that I assumed we would get when we came out here. I am still bitterly disappointed about that, by the way. All the science fiction novels I read totally lied to me about that.”

  “Sorry, Joey. Maybe if you go to the Emerald City, the wizard will give you a brain.”

  “Speaking of brains, I said you are a genius, because while I was rowing across the Ocean of Nowhere I had an idea. Can you show me that map of our quadrant of the galaxy again? This time, I want you to show me the locations of known Elder power taps that are not functional.”

  “Damn it,” Skippy grumbled. “I know you have an idea there somewhere, but I cannot figure out what it could be. A nonfunctional power tap isn’t useful to anyone, Joe. It certainly isn’t something that would convince the Ruhar that they should retain control of Paradise.”

  “Uh huh, got it.” The map was thickly dotted with yellow lights. “Wow, there must be a lot of nonfunctional power taps.”

  “Correct again. Most power taps are nonfunctional, which is why the functional ones are so highly prized and well-guarded. Duh.”

  “Great. Now, remove all the nonfunctional power taps that are on planets with a large population, or are at military facilities with heavy protection, or are held by the Rindhalu or Maxolhx. Like you did last time.”

  “I still do not see where you are going with this, Joe. This bothers me. It makes me think there might be a fundamental difference between organic and artificial minds.”

  “Could be,” I said, distracted. Now there were a lot less yellow dots on the map, but there were still plenty of them. Last time, the count had gone from over a thousand, to 83, to zero. Now we had something to work with. The counter in the corner still showed 7,642. “Wow! Over seven thousand of them?”

  “Congratulations on your reading skills, Joey. I will ask the teacher to give you a juice box. Yes. As I said, nonfunctional power taps are not only nowhere near as rare as functional ones, but they are also considered much, much less valuable. Because they don’t work, many of them are at research facilities. All of the species who possess nonfunctional power taps are attempting to figure out how they work, and reverse engineer one. To date, even the Rindhalu have made essentially zero progress in that area. There are two types of nonfunctional power taps. Those that are truly inert, and when they are taken apart they are simply a tightly packed mass of exotic particles that dissolves into basically sand. The second type are those which have lost their quantum connection, but retain potential energy within their matrix. When that second type is taken apart, they explode violently. Like, a megaton level explosion. I mention that last part, in case you have the moronic idea of capturing one of these nonfunctional power taps and taking it apart.”

  “I am not planning to screw with any of those things, Skippy.”

  “Then I still do not see the point of-”

  “My plan is to get you to screw with one.”

  “You’ve lost me, Joe.”

  “Go back to the map again, please. Show me only power taps that are nonfunctional, but that you could fix.”

  “Holy shit,” Skippy ga
sped with realization.

  “You can do that, right? You know how these things work, there must be some out there that you could restore to functioning.”

  “There are. Damn, there are times when I wish I had an organic brain,” he grumbled. “And that is something I never thought I would say. Yes, Joe, this could be another one of your brilliant ideas. Instead of trying to steal one of the most valuable objects in the galaxy, we only need to steal one from a junkyard, and fix it up. Ok, now the map will show nonfunctional Elder power taps that I know I could fix. One of them merely needs to be rebooted, but the dumdums who have it are clueless.”

  The map now showed two blinking yellow lights. “Two? Crap, Skippy, I hoped there would be more.”

  “Oops, sorry, Joe. The dots on the map indicate places which have nonfunctional power taps. Between those two places, they hold over forty power taps. Both locations I am showing are research facilities, so they logically have concentrated equipment together.”

  “Ah, well, my mother told me that if wishes were fishes, we would all be swimming in riches. Ok, tell me about these two facilities.”

  “One is buried deep within a moon, that is a Jeraptha facility. While the moon itself is not heavily guarded, the planet the moon orbits contains a major fleet servicing spacedock.”

  “That one is out,” I said with disappointment. “I do not want to make enemies of the Jeraptha. And we shouldn’t try to tackle such a tough target. How about the other one?”

  “The other one is more interesting, Joe,” Skippy said as my laptop screen zoomed way in to show a star system. “This is a Thuranin research station that is built into an asteroid.”

  “Oh,” I groaned, “not another asteroid.”

  “You’d better get used to it, Joe. Hollowed-out asteroids are very convenient, so they are commonly used as space stations. They are plentiful, cheap and provide raw materials. Anyway, this particular asteroid was in the Oort Cloud of this star system, and was moved inward to closely orbit the neutron star. It orbits the star so closely that it is impossible for starships to jump in or out near the asteroid, so ships have to jump in far away and travel to the asteroid the long way. This gives the Thuranin plenty of warning when ships are approaching. The X-rays emitted by the star also degrade the usefulness of stealth fields, so it is almost impossible to sneak up on the station.”