Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “No, our federal friends have not been informed yet. The Chief Administrator thought you would enjoy performing that task personally.”

  It was Baturnah’s turn to smile broadly. She would enjoy that. She would certainly enjoy that very much.

  “Awesome! Yes! That’s great!” Skippy exulted.

  “Would you like to clue me in, Skippy?” I asked in a peevish tone. “What is awesome?” Through the SkippyTel network, we had been listening to the Burgermeister’s conversation, despite the extensive security features of her office. The sound had been muddy; her voice came across much deeper than I remembered. That didn’t matter. We heard everything we needed to hear.

  “Joe, the cover story we used with Major Perkins was that Emby was a group of native Ruhar. Thank you, Sergeant Adams, for that idea.”

  “That’s what I get paid for,” Adams replied with a grin.

  “But I’ve been concerned that the Ruhar would look into our cover story and realize it is rather thin. So I’ve been trying to think of another story we could feed the Ruhar government. Actually, you should have been trying to think of a better cover story, that’s your job, Joe. I do everything else around here. Now we don’t need to do anything; Baturnah Logellia thought up a perfect cover story all on her own. And she has already convinced herself that it must be true.”

  “You mean because she thinks the Mysterious Benefactor is the Kristang Black Tree clan?” I asked skeptically. “Come on, Skippy, the Kristang are hateful lizards, but would one clan do that to another? The Black Trees will just deny the whole thing. They know they didn’t do it.”

  “Yes, Joe, one Kristang clan would screw another clan like that, and they’d do it with great enthusiasm. Of course the Black Trees will publically deny everything. The other clans, especially the Swift Arrows, will publically condemn the supposed actions of the Black Trees. Privately, the Black Trees will be jumping up and down, high-fouring each other because the Swift Arrows have lost a major opportunity. And in private, the other clan leaders will admire the Black Trees for screwing the Swift Arrows so effectively.”

  “Shit. They really are hateful lizards,” I shook my head.

  “That they are, Joe,” Skippy agreed. “Once the Kristang learn that a functional Elder power tap was found on Paradise, and a pair of working comm nodes, the other Kristang will be furious at the Black Trees for allowing the Ruhar to have such powerful devices. However, again, the other clans will privately agree that the Black Trees would have been harmed even more if the Swift Arrows had possession of those devices. Admiral Kekrando of the Swift Arrow task force will be tearing his ships apart to find a Black Tree agent. That means his task force will distracted for several weeks, at least, and they will not present a threat to Paradise. So, everybody wins!” Skippy said scornfully. “Except the Swift Arrows, of course. They got totally screwed any way you look at it.”

  “Darn,” I said with a frown. “Skippy, I feel just terrible for the Swift Arrows,” I lied. The Swift Arrows were responsible for me wearing the silver eagles of a colonel. They had also ordered me to kill civilians, and planned to execute me. “I would like to send them a nice sympathy note.”

  “A card, sir?” Adams asked, surprised.

  “No,” I said with a grin. “I thought we’d write the note on the casing of a nuke, and deliver that to them.”

  “That is not exactly a Hallmark moment, Joe,” Skippy chuckled.

  “It would be for us,” Adams said with a wink.

  “I have one question, Skippy,” I said.

  “Only one? Considering your general lack of knowledge about, well, pretty much anything, I find it surprising that you only have one question,” Skippy replied.

  I ignored his insult. “You said the Kristang would be high-fouring each other?”

  “Yeah, so? The lizards have four fingers on each hand, instead of five. Joe, humans are not the only species that uses celebratory hand gestures. Duh.”

  “Oh. Ok, that’s what I thought.”

  We hung around Paradise for another forty nine days, with me fretting every day that somehow the Kristang would learn the Ruhar had found a working power tap and a pair of comm nodes. Skippy was fairly frantic at the unforgivably poor communications security of the Ruhar. Even with Admiral Kekrando’s ships several light minutes away, and considering the notoriously crappy sensors of Kristang ships, they could hardly have failed to learn the secret if Skippy hadn’t been helping the Ruhar. Every day, he had to intercept hundreds of messages before the Kristang could listen in. There were two chatty Ruhar working on the power tap engineering team who were constantly sending barely-encrypted messages back and forth. Skippy finally resorted to frying both of their zPhone and computers, twice, before they got the idea that maybe they should not be talking about secrets on unsecure equipment. Somehow, due to constant diligence by Skippy, but mostly due to what he claimed must have been a miracle, the Kristang never did discover the great secret of Paradise. During one particularly bad day, Skippy had a suggestion. “Hey, Joe, how about I create a daily summary of top secret Ruhar communications and send it directly to Admiral Kekrando? That would be more convenient for everyone involved. Especially for me.”

  I hoped he was joking about that.

  On the seventeenth day, a Ruhar battlegroup jumped in. This battlegroup was configured for heavy planetary defense, being centered around a pair of battleships. The battleships were slow and clumsy, but they had impressive shields and armaments. The Kristang moved their remaining ships further away from Paradise, and loudly protested the Ruhar violation of the cease fire agreement. The Ruhar retorted that the new ships had not fired a shot, therefore the cease fire was still in effect. And if Admiral Kekrando’s few remaining ships wished to test them, the new Ruhar battleships would be happy to show him what a real cease fire violation looks like. Two days later, a second Ruhar battlegroup with a trio of heavy cruisers showed up at the party. On day twenty three, the Ruhar federal government announced that negotiations to trade the planet Gehtanu were suspended. This was news to most of the native Ruhar on Gehtanu; until then most of them had not known there were any negotiations. That same day, the Ruhar announced they had found valuable Elder artifacts on Gehtanu.

  Twelve days after that, Admiral Kekrando’s remaining ships accepted a humiliating offer from the Jeraptha for a ride home.

  On day thirty eight, we got a surprise; the Ruhar found a real comm node on Paradise! A comm node that even Skippy hadn’t known about. The thing didn’t work, of course. It did greatly encourage the Ruhar in the belief that Gehtanu could be a treasure trove of Elder artifacts. And that began the end game of our plan to rescue UNEF.

  “Yes, we accomplished the same effect with our testing,” Tohn Logen didn’t bother to keep the irritation from his voice. Since the federal government ‘experts’ had arrived on Gehtanu, he had lost control of the Elder power tap and the pair of communications nodes. The nodes were now being tested by the military; a report Tohn saw the previous day stated that they were now experiencing instantaneous transmission across a distance of three lighthours. Unlike Tohn’s initial assessment, the bandwidth of signals that could be pushed through the nodes was not unlimited. The nodes experienced data dropouts when the energy of signals pushed through the nodes exceeded 1.43 megawatts. Which was essentially unlimited in practical terms; one megawatt could carry the entire compressed message traffic of the Ruhar homeworld.

  Having the military take the comm nodes away from him didn’t much bother Tohn; he was primarily a power plant engineer. What he cared about was the power tap; that nearly-magical source of endless power. In the history of the Ruhar civilization, they had only ever possessed two working power taps before. The first power tap had been discovered by accident on a small moon of the second world the Ruhar had ever colonized. At the time, the Ruhar had agreed to the Jeraptha’s request to turn the precious power tap over to them. Lacking sufficient technology to analyze or use Elder technology, the Ruhar bac
k then had gotten the best deal they could; giving the power tap to the Jeraptha, in exchange for a Jeraptha commitment to support the Ruhar colonizing a third planet. That was a very good deal for the then-young Ruhar civilization’s ambitions for expanding into space.

  The second power tap was found aboard the wreckage of an Elder ship, found orbiting a young, hot white dwarf star. The Ruhar had expended immense resources to recover the scattered wreckage of the Elder ship, losing three Ruhar ships in the process. That power tap was kept by the Ruhar, and currently resided on their homeworld. Within four decades of it being recovered, that second power tap was put to use. It now powered part of the homeworld’s defense network; if the defense net was fully active, the power tap could provide sixteen gigawatts of energy.

  Tohn knew the power tap would not remain on the backwater world of Gehtanu forever, and he knew that his time for being in charge of the research was over already. He even knew that the ‘experts’ might actually know a bit more than he did.

  They didn’t have to be so damned arrogant about it. When they arrived, they had acted appalled that he and his team had done anything with the precious power tap. That Tohn had gotten the tap to provide continuous power without the assistance of ‘experts’ had scandalized the federal team. Essentially, they had patted him on the head like a small child, praised him for his work to date, and shooed him away from the research facility. It had taken direct intervention by the planet’s Chief Administrator for Tohn to be allowed to even view the testing; he still would certainly never be allowed to touch anything. Nor was his advice listened to. “I’m telling you, we already ran that test successfully, five times,” Tohn said with great exasperation.

  “You did that with your software,” one of the federal scientists remarked. “We are using a considerably more sophisticated analysis tool.”

  What infuriated Tohn more than the man’s insufferable arrogance was that the man was not even aware he was being insulting. To the scientist, what he said was obvious and any intelligent person would appreciate the facts. At least that meant, Tohn thought, that the scientists thought he was somewhat intelligent. “So you are actually testing your software,” Tohn said with intentional sarcasm. “I understand now.”

  “Yes,” the man had entirely missed the sarcasm of Tohn’s remark. “We will establish a baseline.”

  Tohn rolled his eyes and decided to get a fresh cup of hot klah, as the experiment was not scheduled to go above the microwatt level until that afternoon.

  It was that afternoon when things got interesting.

  By midafternoon, the power tap’s output was a steady ten kilowatts. So far, the results of the federal scientists exactly matched the results Tohn’s team had achieved five times. Rather than praising Tohn and his team, the scientists remarked that Tohn had been remarkably lucky with his crude software, equipment and techniques.

  The next phase of testing achieved different results from what Tohn’s team had seen. “Hmmm,” one of the scientists said with concern. “Dial it back. Bring the input frequency to 6.2, please. Hmmm.”

  “What is it?” Tohn craned his neck to see over the scientist’s shoulder.

  “Nothing. Please do not interfere,” he said to Tohn. The scientist then spoke into his microphone. “It’s still increasing. Cut input power. Yes, now! Shut it down!”

  “What’s the problem?” Tohn leaned in to almost shove the man out of the way. “What the hell did you idiots do?” Tohn shouted in alarm. The power tap’s output should have been less than 20 kilowatts. Instead, the meter showed the power tap was at 400 kilowatts and, as Tohn watched, it climbed over 500 kilowatts.

  “Nothing!” The man protested. “We didn’t do anything!”

  “This is your damned software,” Tohn said through gritted teeth. “Turn it off.”

  “We did! There’s no input signal,” the man pointed to the screen, showing a flat line where the input signal indicator was.

  Tohn watched in alarm as the power tap’s generation exceeded one megawatt, then 1.5 megawatts. Two megawatts. “I think we should consider getting out of here,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, oh, Joey,” Skippy said. “There has been an unfortunate glitch in the Ruhar testing of our power tap. It has somehow gotten out of control. Darn, I hate it when that happens. This is a puzzle; I can’t explain it.”

  “That is truly terrible, Skippy,” I replied, while concentrating on the crossword puzzle I had been working on most of the day. “Any chance they can stop it?”

  “Ha!” Skippy laughed. “About the same odds as you finishing that crossword puzzle.”

  “Seriously, Skippy. Is there any chance they could somehow stop the power tap from exploding?’

  “Sadly, no,” Skippy didn’t sound sad at all. “Not this time. Huh. Some of those idiots haven’t gotten the idea that they had best get the hell out of there. I’ll temporarily goose power output to 1.21 gigawatts.”

  “Did that work?” I asked, now paying attention. The crossword was stupid anyway. Doubly so, because Adams had solved it in like twenty minutes during breakfast that morning. “I don’t want any casualties, Skippy.”

  “If someone is monumentally stupid, does that count as a casualty, Joe?”

  “That’s a gray area. Depends on how stupid.”

  “I’ll give them ten minutes to board the last air transport out. Let’s see what 5 megawatts does. Ha! They got the message that time. Ok, the last of them is running to get out. Aircraft engines are warming up.”

  Tohn Logen was fifty kilometers away in a speeding aircraft, when the priceless Elder power tap exploded with a force of almost a kiloton. The blast rocked the isolated forest where the testing facility had been. Looking out the window at the developing mushroom cloud, Tohn turned to the federal scientist seated next to him. “Don’t worry. I am not going to say ‘I told you so’.”

  Ten minutes later, they received the awful news that at the exact moment the power tap exploded, the pair of communications nodes stopped working. Tohn shook his head. “This day just keeps getting better and better,” he muttered to no one. Now, maybe he could convince the Chief Administrator not to let federal ‘experts’ screw with toys that belonged to the residents of Gehtanu. Residents of Gehtanu, like Tohn Logen. And maybe he needed to think of buying a house, instead of renting.

  He planned to be on Gehtanu for a while.

  “It exploded?” Baturnah Logellia asked, shocked.

  “It did,” Tohn Logen confirmed over the phone. “It was fairly spectacular, too. Like a small nuke, or a high-power railgun round. We’re lucky, I guess. If it hadn’t exploded, it might have melted its way down to the center of the planet, and caused all kinds of seismic issues with the crust.”

  “Do you know what went wrong?” The deputy administrator of the planet asked.

  Tohn looked around the cramped interior of the aircraft. “Administrator,” he said more loudly than he needed to. “You will need to ask our federal scientist experts why the test went so badly wrong.” They were all avoiding his eyes.

  “Do you have any idea why the comm node pair failed at the same time?”

  “At this time, no, I do not,” Tohn admitted. “I do not think the power tap was providing energy to the comm nodes remotely, although that could be possible. More likely the explosion of the power tap caused some sort of effect in spacetime that disrupted the connection between the two comm nodes.”

  The deputy administrator of the planet said a very bad word. “This is a setback,” she said with great understatement.

  “Yes, Administrator Logellia.” He lowered his voice. “Is there any chance that our federal friends will now pack up their ships and go home?” The Kristang task force’s remaining ships had not yet departed the Gehtanu system. If the Ruhar fleet left, the planet would have to rely again on a limited number of projectors. And now the Kristang knew exactly where each one of those projectors were.

  “No,” she laughed bitterly. “No, that will not happ
en. I was talking with the fleet admiral this morning; she spent an hour telling me how the ‘events on tiny Gehtanu’ have caused the Jeraptha to shift their forces in the sector. They launched a major new offensive two days ago. The Thuranin and Kristang are going to be very busy for many months. Also, I think the federal government will be embarrassed enough about this fiasco, that they will be extremely eager to explore every bit of this planet to find more Elder artifacts. To answer your question; the fleet is here to stay.”

  “That is great news,” Tohn breathed a sigh of relief. “Administrator Logellia? One more thing, please?”

  “What?”

  “That other comm node we just found? Could you make sure our federal scientist friends don’t mess with it?”

  “I will keep it under my pillow if I have to,” Baturnah said with determination. “Nobody touches it until you get here.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  “Is everyone ready back there?” Derek asked over the intercom from the cockpit.

  “Everybody Ok?” Irene asked while standing in the doorway to the cockpit. The cockpit of the Buzzard. Her Buzzard. Not as her personal property; it was close enough. The Ruhar were allowing her to continue flying it, with Derek as her copilot. Derek wanted to get back to flying Chicken gunships, or ‘Dobrehs’ as he called that fighter aircraft. Until he fully recovered from his injuries and was ready for a qualification flight in a Dobreh, he would keep his flying skills fresh in Irene’s Buzzard.

  Irene just wanted to fly, anything, anywhere. Hauling passengers and cargo back and forth between Lemuria and Tenturo was fine with her.

  “I’m ready,” Major Perkins said, settling back in her seat. She would be going first to UNEF HQ, to meet with General Marcellus, and then probably with General Nivelle, the UNEF commander. Marcellus had a lot of catching up to do; her debriefing was not going to be quick. She suspected, hoped, that her farming days were over for a while. Baturnah Logellia had offered her a position as the UNEF intelligence liaison with the Ruhar; that would require moving to Tenturo. That would mean living amongst Ruhar rather than her fellow humans. Perkins wasn’t sure what she wanted yet. The point, she reminded herself, was that she had a choice, she had possibilities now. All the humans on Paradise had a future. The Ruhar were in charge, and they weren’t leaving. Early that morning, before the sun rose, she had walked outside in the cool air and saw sunlight shining off a Ruhar battleship in orbit. It was a big damned thing, and there were more on the way. Discovering projectors on Paradise had not been the only surprise, nor the most important. The Ruhar had found some type of incredibly valuable Elder artifact in the process of investigating the projectors. She had heard there was an accident with one of the artifacts; rather than discouraging the Ruhar, it had spurred their determination to keep the planet and uncover all its secrets.