Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  Perkins put Arlon Dahl and a team of Ruhar cadets on the task of hacking into the research files of the Kristang base, hoping they could extract data detailing the pathogen’s chemical signatures, lifecycle, test results and possible antigens. The next morning, she walked to the dropship that was being used for the hacking effort, just as Nert walked down the open side ramp. The Ruhar cadet waved to her, then bent backwards and forwards, with a grimace.

  “Are you well, Cadet?” Perkins asked.

  “Yes, Colonel Perkins. My back is sore from sitting at the console for too long. The team is working very hard,” he assured her, “we worked all night.”

  “Any results?”

  “No, their security around the lab computer is very strong. Arlon Dahl says it is airtight.”

  “We can’t access the data remotely?”

  Nert looked distractedly at the tablet in one hand. “We would have better luck playing ‘Pick Up Sticks’ with our butt cheeks.”

  Despite the seriousness of the situation, she had to smile. “Nert, is that another colorful expression you learned from the Third Infantry?”

  “No,” he turned toward her, his skin under the light fur turning a darker shade of pink. “I heard that from Shauna, that is, Sergeant Jarrett. Is it a bad thing to say?”

  “No. It is only, discouraging to hear.”

  “The team is continuing to work on the problem,” Nert forced a smile.

  “But they’re not optimistic, are they?”

  “No, Colonel, they are not. I must be truthful, there has been no progress for the past seven hours. The remaining methods we could use to access the data remotely pose a serious risk of our cyber attack being detected. I am sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Cadet. You and the team have endured harsh conditions and performed far beyond expectations. It looks like,” she looked off to the horizon, far beyond which lay the Kristang base. “We’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  “There is no way to extract that data remotely?” Perkins requested confirmation of the gloomy news Nert had brought to her.

  “I am sorry, no. Perhaps if we had a team of experts from our data security division, but,” Ernt waved a claw to encompass the tired group around him, “they are Ruhar cadets, and I am not a computer expert.”

  “You did your best, that’s all I can ask. Damn it. If we go in and the lizards spot us before we can get to the data core, they could erase the memory and we’d lose everything, all their records.” She tugged the hair on the back of her head in frustration. “The research computer may be programmed to erase itself in the event of an attack on the base.” She turned her attention to the two Verd-Kris. “What do we know about this research base?”

  “Not enough,” Tutula pointed to her display. “We have the original schematics of the compound, back when the Kristang built it to study the star here and its effects on the planet. They were hoping to understand how the Elder weapon created a focused solar flare that cooked this world,” she grinned and bounced her eyeballs up and down in the Ruhar equivalent of an eyeroll. “They had no chance of understanding technology on that level. The base has been expanded and modified over the years, especially the research facilities, and we do not have access to those records, other than very basic information.”

  “Very well,” Perkins unfolded a chair and sat down. “Show me what we do know.”

  “What’s the plan, Ma’am?” Shauna asked, looking up from her tablet. All eyes turned to the human commander, with the two Verd-Kris in particular waiting intently to hear what the primitive being would say.

  Perkins took a breath, steadying herself. “I say we go in hot, kill everyone, take the data and bug out quick.” She looked to Irene, then Derek, then the two Verd-Kris pilots. “If it moves and it’s not us, kill it. I don’t care about collateral damage to the base buildings, as long as you don’t hit the main research complex.”

  “What about your Kee-purr people?” Tutula asked, pronouncing ‘Keeper’ slowly. “We believe there are still a group of humans at the base.”

  “Don’t fire on them deliberately,” Perkins’ hard expression softened slightly. “But don’t take any risk either. If there’s a-” she almost said ‘lizard’. “If there’s an enemy shooting at us and he’s surrounded by Keepers, take them all out.”

  “You are willing to sacrifice your own people to accomplish the mission?” Tutula’s eyes narrowed as she waited for Perkins’ answer.

  “As far as I’m concerned, those Keepers have pretty much fucked themselves,” Perkins spat on the dusty ground. “I’m not risking a single one of our lives for them. You have a problem with that?” She stared Tutula straight in the eye.

  “No, Colonel Perkins,” Tutula’s lips twitched in what was intended as a smile. “Your mission focus is admirable. My people are not cruel like the Kristang you have encountered in the past, but we are also not soft. We do not believe in half measures.” A shadow fell across her expression, and she added in a low voice “With our small numbers against those of the warrior caste who have stolen and perverted our culture, we cannot afford to be sentimental.”

  Perkins nodded. “There are less than two dozen Keepers at that base, if we can believe the outdated info we retrieved. Over a hundred thousand humans are on Paradise, and millions of Ruhar. We are not putting all those lives at risk just to possibly rescue a small number of Keepers. When they removed the UNEF insignia from their uniforms, they should have gotten a Big Chicken Dinner,” Perkins forgot the aliens would not understand the slang for Bad Conduct Discharge. “I don’t hate the Keepers, most of them are too stupid to know what they’re doing. But they got themselves into this mess, and now their mess is threatening all the lives on Paradise and maybe beyond.”

  “Ma’am,” Shauna’s face had a strained, uncomfortable expression. “What will we do, if we take out the enemy and there are Keepers still alive?”

  “We can’t take them with us,” Perkins noted. “We have to assume they’re all infected and we have to minimize our exposure. That means our suits stay buttoned up the whole time, and we follow full decontamination procedures on the egress. We can’t bring infected Keepers with us.” She continued to use the term ‘Keepers’ because if she called them ‘humans’ or ‘people’ it would be more difficult to ignore their situation. “If we accomplish the mission and some Keepers survive, their best bet is to remain in place. The liz-” she almost used derogatory slang in front of the Verd-Kris, “The Kristang must have food for the Keepers there, we certainly don’t have enough food with us to feed that number of people. They can remain at the base.”

  Though Shauna still looked uncomfortable, her arms across her chest and shoulders slumped forward, curled into herself, she nodded briefly. “We have to tell them about the bioweapon program. They deserve to know the truth.”

  Dave snorted. “Come on, Shauna, those Sleepers have had the truth staring them in the face for years, and they don’t see it because they don’t want to see it. What makes you think that us telling them the Kristang have been using them as lab rats will change their minds?”

  “Hey, chill, Ski,” Jesse replied in defense of his girlfriend, putting an arm around Shauna’s shoulders to show he understood her feelings on the subject. “Like the Colonel said, some of them are just too dumb to know what they’re doing. Or they are gullible and followed the wrong people. Look at Eric Koblenz. Yeah, the guy was a Grade-A asshole, but I don’t think he would do anything to kill people on Paradise, his own people.”

  “Ok, ’Pone, yeah, Eric was too dumb to know what he’s doing,” Dave agreed.

  “We should tell them,” Irene added. “If they don’t believe us now, they will when they all start dying in a couple months.”

  “Hell,” Jesse kicked the dusty ground with the toe of a boot. “What a freakin’ mess. How did we get such bad karma?”

  “Bad?” Perkins pretended to be surprised. “Colter, this is good karma in disguise. If our star carrier hadn’t got
ten blown up, we would never have known about the threat to Paradise. And we would not now have this marvelous opportunity to shine.”

  Jesse tilted his head at their commanding officer. “You do know what ‘opportunity’ means in the military, right, Ma’am?”

  “I do, Colter, and my ass will be on the line right beside you.”

  Tutula clapped her hands, startling the humans. “I see an opportunity for direct action against the warrior caste who have oppressed my people for millennia. When do we start, Colonel Perkins?”

  “Now. Prep a dropship.”

  The dropship, with Tutula and Derek flying the outbound leg and Irene acting as relief pilot, followed a medium then low-altitude stealth flight profile until it was within six hundred kilometers of the base, where the ship’s sensors picked up the faintest traces of backscatter from the network of active sensors surrounding the base. At that point, with risk of detection approaching an unacceptable three percent, Derek gently turned one hundred eighty degrees, reduced speed and gradually lost altitude while the others prepped the package. A minute later, a door opened under the dropship’s tail and a stream of stealthy foam-covered balls fell out, tumbling smoothly as they fell away.

  The dropship gradually increased power and climbed, while the crew anxiously monitored extremely faint data feeds from the cluster of more than three dozen sensor drones they had ejected. When each drone fell to four thousand feet above the ground, an invisible nanofiber parachute deployed, spreading wide and momentarily bringing its payload almost to a halt in midair. The foam coating dissolved and the drone unfolded itself, sprouting wings that swept back to allow the hummingbird-sized drone to build airspeed. Each drone checked in with its fellows by line-of-sight laserlink, and only one drone out of the thirty eight was found to be operating at less than the optimal level. As that drone was not needed, it self-destructed with the consent of its flock, sending particles no larger than a fingernail to rain softly down and bury into the dusty ground.

  Flying slowly to conserve fuel and avoiding tripping enemy motion sensors by artificially disturbing the air, the flock of drones approached the base, encircling it. Several times, a drone had to go into hover mode as it was swept by an active sensor pulse. The risk was that the Kristang might have set their air cover sensors on an ultra-sensitive mode, for the planet had no flying animal life and therefore anything moving in a way not directed by the prevailing winds had to be a threat. One drone, pinned in place by an active sensor pulse that came back to sweep over it three times, self-destructed to avoid detection, so no alarm was raised at the base. None of the drones risked overflying the site, but as the base was in a mountain valley, no overflight was needed. One by one, the drones set down just inside the lines of ridges and foothills, selecting locations where they had line of sight to the base below on the valley floor. Each drone focused its own passive sensors on a different area of the base, switching focus in a preprogrammed, coordinated fashion to provide a three-dimensional map of the target.

  “Ah, damn it!” Dave threw up his hands as he saw the recently-assembled composite image of the Kristang research base. His frustration was not because of the base’s defenses, for those appeared to be minimal. There were only two antiaircraft maser batteries and the Mavericks could deal with those before the assault. The single dropship assigned to the base was also not a problem, it was out of its hardened underground bunker with one of the engines laying exposed on the ground in pieces. As Dave watched, two Kristang were having an animated argument about the disassembled engine, shouting something at each other. The sensors were too far away to pick up the lizards’ words, and Dave didn’t give a rat’s ass what two murderous assholes were saying anyway.

  What he did care about was on the other side of the base, in a separate compound surrounded by a double fence. What he saw there made him angry. A group of a half-dozen humans, standing around in the morning sunlight. Several others walked between buildings in the compound, and from the size of the buildings, Dave guessed there might be as many as fifty humans housed there. He zoomed in the image to the point where, despite the super high-tech image stabilization and enhancement gear of the sensors, he still had to blink to understand what the slightly fuzzy view was showing him. Then he understood, for he had seen that same image many times before in his military career. The rectangular areas of flattened dirt were where tents had been set up, tents or some other type of temporary shelter. People had walked over the flattened ground after the tents had been removed, but from the heavy tracks leading to where the tents had been, he knew they had been occupied at some point. Probably the compound recently had held many more humans, perhaps double or triple the number that could be housed in the permanent buildings. “Interesting,” he muttered, then, “Colonel! Ma’am, we got a problem.”

  “What is it, Czajka?”

  “Keepers,” he nearly spat with disgust. From the enhanced image, he could see the people standing around in the sunlight were wearing military uniforms, so they had to be Keepers. “There are at least a dozen of those shitheads, from what I’ve seen. Could be more still in those buildings.”

  “That’s the control group, then,” Perkins looked at Ernt Dahl.

  “Control group?” Shauna looked at the Jeraptha, who was shifting his rear pair of legs nervously.

  Perkins explained. “Arlon Dahl found information that one group of Keepers here was used as a control group; they were not infected, while other groups were infected with different versions of the pathogen. If a test group became sick unexpectedly but the control group also got sick, the Kristang would know the cause was some environmental factor and not the experimental pathogen. Until now, we did not know whether any of the control group was still alive, because the records Dahl could access stopped updating when the last group of researchers left this planet. We do know all the Ruhar they brought here are dead, they used the Ruhar control group for the final test.”

  “I wonder why that group of Keepers is still alive?” Jesse rubbed the back of his neck. “I mean, why bother? You can see from that double-layer fence, the lizards here think those Keepers are a security risk.”

  “Insurance?” Shauna guessed. “In case something goes wrong with the op on Paradise. Or, in case they decide to use the pathogen on another Ruhar planet, maybe.”

  Dave tapped the display again. “Ma’am, I just thought of something. That control group, they’ve been here a long time, right?”

  “Likely they came here soon after they left Paradise. Why?”

  “If we have been exposed to the original bioweapon by breathing the air here, the one the lizards planned to use on Earth, then those Keepers must have been exposed also.”

  “Damn,” Jesse slapped Dave on the back. “You’re right, man. They’re still alive, so we must have been exposed only to a dead virus. We’re good!”

  “Not necessarily,” Perkins stated with a frown, and Dave nodded agreement. “The Keepers may have been given a vaccine against the original bioweapon.”

  “Yeah, and in that case,” Dave tapped the display, “the vaccine must be in that base somewhere. Would a vaccine do us any good, now that we’ve already been exposed?”

  “I don’t know,” Perkins admitted.

  “Colonel Perkins,” Ernt Dahl crossed his forearms. “I am not an expert on biological weapons, but I doubt the Kristang would have vaccinated or treated the humans here against another pathogen. Because humans on Paradise have not been exposed to the original pathogen, giving the control group here a vaccine or post-infection treatment would alter their immune response from the baseline, and reduce their usefulness as a true control group.”

  “Oh. Yeah, that makes sense,” Perkins’ mouth was a flat line across her face. “Unless the Kristang didn’t have a choice about it, since they had contaminated this whole planet already. Czajka, good thinking, we’ll look for a treatment or something when we get inside that base. Shit. That original bioweapon is another damned good reason why we need t
o take that base, soon.”

  “Not just to protect ourselves,” Dave said, knowing what she was thinking.

  “No. If there is a vaccine or treatment in there somewhere, we need it. If we ever get to Earth and the lizards there haven’t already used the bioweapon against our people, we need a countermeasure.”

  “Can we do it? Bottom line,” Perkins stood with her arms crossed after reviewing the data gathered by the sensors.

  “Yes,” Tutula’s confidence was absolute. “Their air defenses are minimal,” she looked to Ernt Dahl for confirmation.

  The beetle raised its antenna in a sort of shrug. “I am not an expert on antiaircraft systems, I am not familiar with the subject at all. My training was for fleet service,” he admitted.

  “Their air defenses are weak and degraded,” Tutula enhanced the display image, highlighting two areas. “These are defensive maser turrets. I suspect one of them is offline and has been that way for a long time.”

  “How do you know that?” Perkins asked, leaning forward to get a better view.

  “These turrets require regular maintenance, and test-firing after components are replaced. The turret to the south has vehicle tracks leading from the base, and footprints around the site. Vehicle tracks at the north site have been obscured by blowing sand, and there are no footprints. Also, this hatch,” she zoomed in the view so powerfully that the image became fuzzy and shook slightly. “It is open. It should be closed. I think someone tried to fix a mechanical failure in that turret, and gave up. With the warrior caste,” she avoided using the word ‘Kristang’, “scheduled to abandon this planet, they would not expend much effort to maintain facilities here.”