“Anyway,” I glared toward the front of the Condor where Skippy’s beer can was secured in a cabinet, “it sure as hell wasn’t my idea to make it a threesome. The two of us were doing just fine by ourselves. We were, uh, a little drunk.”
“Ah,” Adams nodded and held up a hand to say she didn’t need any more information on the subject.
“What about astronomy, Sir?” Simms asked, looking like continuing any conversation with me right then was the last thing she wanted.
“Astronomy, right, thank you,” I answered, relieved to change the subject. “I have been looking at broken pieces of starships, left over from earlier attempts to recon this system.”
“Why, Joe?” Skippy was puzzled. “Idle curiosity? They’re broken, Joe. All that stuff floating around out there is useless junk. Duh.”
“Because, duh,” I shot back at him, “you said the Guardians stop attacking when a ship is no longer a threat.”
“Yeah, so?” Skippy’s voice wasn’t so condescendingly confident as usual.
“So, if I was going to design a ship to recon this system, it would be a modular craft, with each section containing its own power generation and propulsion. That way, if one section was damaged or destroyed, the remainder of the ship would still be useful.”
“That, makes, sense, I guess,” Skippy said slowly. “In fact, several attempts to gain access to this system used that approach. Although it didn’t do them any good. In order to halt further Guardian assault, power generation needs to be cut completely, rendering the ship useless.”
“Useless at the time, yeah,” I noted. “What about now?”
“What about now?” Skippy was confused. “Why would that matter?”
“Because now, a certain shiny asshole beer can told the Guardians to stand down, right? Your ID codes got the Guardians to halt attacks on any ship in this system, whether it generates power or not, right? That’s why the reactor on the lifeboat hasn’t caused the Guardians to tear the Dutchman apart.”
Simms’s mouth formed a silent ‘O’ as she got my idea. “Colonel, you’re thinking maybe there’s useful equipment floating among the junk out there?”
“Hoping,” I corrected her. “I’m hoping there’s something useful. If any other species tried to start up a reactor, or use propulsion, the Guardians would be on top of them in a second. But thanks to Skippy the Meh, we can go poking around this system and if we find anything useful, we may be able to reactivate a ship. Or use the components to fix the Dutchman.” Fixing the Dutchman, making our pirate ship the Flying Dutchman again, would be my first choice, unless there was some awesomely powerful Rindhalu cruiser or something like that out there. We knew the Dutchman, we’d gotten the interior fixed up to accommodate humans. Another ship would be too much of an unknown, and we were already on the razor edge of survival as it was. “What do you think, Skippy?”
There was no answer. All three of us turned to look forward in alarm, and Simms reached out a hand to pull herself through the doorway, when Skippy responded. “Sorry about that, I was using my reduced although still ginormous brain power to examine the data collected by the Dutchman. You should have told me what you were doing, Joe, you wasted a lot of time and missed a whole bunch of useful data.”
“But?” I asked hopefully.
“But, if you are expecting me to tell you there is a derelict ship out there just waiting for us to pump up the tires and fill it with gas before it can fly, the answer is no. It’s impossible to say with certainty given the crappy Thuranin sensors I am forced to work with, but every ship I can find out there is a broken hulk.”
“But?” I pressed. With Skippy, there was always a ‘but’.
Skippy sighed. “But, it is remotely, remotely- I mean, like almost not even worth discussing, remotely possible there are some useful bits and pieces out there that my awesomeness might be able to kludge together to make the Dutchman a real starship again.”
“Duct tape and moondust, Skippy?” I asked with a wink to Adams and Simms.
“Uh, no. This would be more like junkyard and a miracle, Joe. Do not get your stupid monkey hopes up. I still think it is very unlikely I can make a functioning starship out of the scrap floating out there. To fix the Dutchman, I would need to concentrate on broken Thuranin ships, so the technology is compatible.”
“If you forget about the Dutchman,” Adams asked, “could you make a better ship?” She saw the crestfallen look on my face and added “I love the Dutchman too, Sir, but she’s beat up. If we can find something like a Maxolhx battleship and fix it up, that would be a major tactical advantage.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” It was Skippy’s turn to protest. “I will be chasing my tail just to find one or two useful components we might be able to use to aboard the Dutchman. But is that good enough for Margaret Adams? Noooooo. She wants a freakin’ senior-species battleship under the Christmas tree. Is there anything else I can do for you, Sergeant? Would you like a pony?”
“No, Skippy,” Adams said with an ear-to-ear grin. “A battleship would be great. Although, hmm,” she pinched her chin and pretended to think for a moment. “Could you paint it US Marine Corps colors scarlet and gold?”
“She has a good point, Skippy,” I agreed. “I am fond of the Dutchman, but if it is easier to start with another ship out there, or to build a ship entirely from broken parts, we should do that.”
“Easier?” Skippy exclaimed, astonished. “Joe, you clearly have absolutely no idea what you are asking. I’m here, and soon I’ll be on the surface of Gingerbread-”
“We hope,” Simms interjected.
“Yes, we hope,” Skippy stumbled. “I told you I couldn’t promise the surface down there is habitable, it’s behind a stealth field. Anyway, some of the broken ships are several lighthours away. Since I’m working with restricted capabilities now, I’ll be limited to speed of light communications, and ‘speed’ is not the proper word for photons that crawl along barely fast enough to be useful. Could you please explain exactly how I am supposed to control multiple dropships and bots from so far away?”
“I’m not proposing you do that, Skippy,” I said before the beer can blew a gasket. “After we get set up comfortably on Gingerbread, I think we will send out dropships to check out the most likely wrecks out there. We’ll use our own eyes and ears to inspect those hulks, and send the data back to you.”
“Oh.”
“Does that make it easier?”
“I don’t know yet!” Skippy complained. “Damn, you monkeys are impatient. Your ancestors just crawled out of the mud last freakin’ week and already you want everything to move faster. Give me time to think about it. First, I need to review the data that Joe clumsily compiled, then I’m sure I will need to start the search over again.”
“You better hurry there, Skippy,” I urged. “The Dutchman’s sensors are degrading as it gets closer to the star, that’s why I was only able to search the slice of sky pointed almost directly away from the star.”
“Yes, I know that, dumdum. We may lose the Dutchman entirely, and then we would need to rely on dropships sensors. That would not be good at all.”
“Ok, then,” I agreed. “We’ll leave you to it, keep us posted, Ok?”
“If by ‘us’ you mean yourself, Major Simms and Staff Sergeant Adams, I will do that. Please do not go blabbing your mouth to anyone else about this. The last thing I need is an entire crew of monkeys pestering me about whether I can fix the ship.”
“I really should tell Chotek about this, but, Ok. We’ll keep it secret for now,” I promised, and Simms and Adams both nodded. “Soon as you think it’s possible we might have a way out of this mess, though, we need to tell people. People need hope, Skippy. Right now, everyone’s thinking this is a one-way trip down to Gingerbread and that, one way or another, our mission is over.”
“I understand that, Joe. I am also fairly certain that giving people false hope would be worse than no hope at all.”
“Ah, you�
��re right about that, Skippy. Go do your awesome thing, and I promise I won’t bug the crap out of you about it until you’re done.”
The next day, I handled my first flight maneuver of a big Condor dropship. Previously, I had flown the smaller Thuranin dropship that we called a Falcon, and I had been training to fly a Condor. Studying manuals and practicing flight in a simulator was not the same as actually being at the controls. The only reason I took the controls that day was we were still a long way from Gingerbread, and there was nothing around our Condor for me to smash the ship into. Being handed the flight controls was not so much a vote of confidence in my ability, as an acknowledgment there wasn’t anything vital I could screw up in empty interplanetary space.
The actual maneuver took three seconds. Preparing for the maneuver took almost twenty minutes, and after the maneuver we spent more than twenty minutes verifying the Condor was on the proper course and securing the controls until the next day.
All I had done was make a very minor course correction. Every day, our dropship shifted slightly off course as it coasted through space. Sunlight on the hull heated the material unevenly, even with the Condor rotating slowly so one side didn’t get cooked. That gentle pressure of solar radiation nudged us a tiny bit off course each day. People floating around, pushing off bulkheads and using doorways and chairs to catch themselves, caused a reaction. But the single biggest cause of the Condor drifting off course was our SpecOps people keeping in shape as best they could.
In zero gravity, there was no possibility of us lifting weights or running on a regular treadmill. We had high-tech meds that counteracted some of the negative effects of zero gravity on the human body, but Major Smythe fretted that his team would be weak, lethargic and incapable of combat when we landed. So, each Condor had two treadmills that folded away when not in use. A person running on the treadmill wore harnesses around the waist and shoulders that pulled downward, forcing the legs to work. It was nowhere close to real running, but it was better than nothing. Most of our exercise involved using gear with fancy high-tech rubber bands. They weren’t really rubber bands, instead being made of some material that could be adjusted to the desired tension. You would get settled into the contraption we used for a bench press machine, twist a simple dial to adjust the tension to the weight you wanted to simulate, then you pushed forward on the bar. It was a decent workout, in fact I overdid it most of the time, because I was exercising in a single passenger compartment, surrounded by a crowd of people who were waiting for their turn. To save myself from utter humiliation, I often set the dial for about ten pounds heavier than I was used to lifting aboard the Dutchman. The agonizing muscle cramps I got after the first time should have taught me a lesson, but I’m a guy, so I’m genetically predisposed to doing stupid things over and over. I didn’t even have the excuse of saying ‘hold my beer’.
Anyway, all the exercising and bouncing around shook even our big dropship, and caused it to drift ever so slightly off course every day. The cumulative effect of all the course deviations could have been easily handled by less than a minute of thrust as we approached the planet, but being off course bothered our hotshot pilots, so we performed a minor course correction each evening before setting up slings in the passenger cabin for most of the crew to sleep. There also was an unspoken competition among our small fleet of dropships, and no one wanted to be seen as sloppy. It may be silly, but that strong competitive instinct was how people qualified to join the Merry Band of Pirates.
Except me. I just got lucky.
Skippy had gone silent on me. Not silent like when he went dormant, he just hadn’t been talking much. “Hey, Skippy,” I said, more because I was bored than needing to talk with him about anything specific. “What have you been up to?”
“Analysis. I’ve been reviewing the decision for us to come here. When I find a conduit, kill the worm and fix myself, I will be back to the old awesomely magnificent Skippy, and I will be better able to determine if there was an alternative to us going to a Roach Motel. Maybe when we get back to Earth, I can tell UNEF Command there was an alternative, but Joe Stupidhead wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Oh, that would be great. Super awesomely helpful, Skippy.”
“I do what I can, Joe.”
“Please don’t do any more,” I muttered under my breath.
“What?” He answered, his voice already irritated.
That set me back. “What’s bugging you today?”
“You are, you big dope,” he replied grumpily.
“Me?” I asked innocently. “What did I do? We’ve barely spoken today. Thank you for that, by the way. I appreciate the peace and quiet for a change.”
“What did you do?” Sarcasm dripped from his voice. “You promised me you wouldn’t nag me about determining whether there are enough useful pieces of ships out there in the junkyard to fix the Dutchman.”
“Huh?” That baffled me. “I haven’t said one word about it.”
“You don’t have to say anything out loud, Joe, I can tell you are obsessing over it. You’re like a dog that stays quiet, but keeps looking at you on the couch, and looking at the food bowl, then looking at you again. The dog doesn’t say anything, but it is still annoying.”
“Damn, now I can’t even think about it?”
“Not when you’re thinking so freakin’ loud I can’t ignore you!”
“Sorry, Skippy.”
“And now you’re going to ask me about it anyway.”
“No. No, I promised I will wait until you’re done.”
“Good. Because-”
“Even though it is driving me crazy not knowing.”
“Argh! I knew it! I knew you couldn’t just sit quietly while I work.”
“It’s kind of life or death, Skippy.”
“No, it’s life or dull.”
“Huh?”
“The Merry Band of Pirates very likely can survive on Gingerbread. Major Simms brought a range of seeds to provide for a nutritionally complete diet. It won’t be as comfortable as you like, but humans can live here. The problem for you is, life here will be dull, compared to flying around the galaxy in a pirate ship.”
“Oh. Uh, yeah, I guess we could live here.” Bringing a large supply of seeds aboard the Dutchman was a lesson we learned from our second mission, when we had been temporarily stranded on the planet Newark. That time, fortunately, our stay planetside had been brief enough for us to survive mostly on the packaged food we had brought down in dropships. On Gingerbread, unless we could fix the Dutchman or build another starship, we were going to be there a very, very long time. Like, forever. “When I said life or death, I was talking about you. If we can’t find one of these conduit things on Gingerbread, we need to go somewhere else. We humans can survive here, but you’re still ticking down to Zero Hour.”
“I hadn’t thought about it that way, Joe.”
“I do care about you, Skippy, and not just as humanity’s best hope for survival. We owe you, big time.”
“Oh. Thank you. I have to tell you, Joe, this planet is my last hope to find a conduit. If we don’t find one here, the worm is going to get me. Then it won’t matter if the Dutchman can be repaired, because you will be trapped here.”
“Then we need to find a conduit, simple as that. One important lesson I learned in the military is to prepare for the worst, but plan for success. Let’s plan for success, Ok? We will find a conduit thingy, get the old Skippy the Magnificent back, and then we’ll need a starship to get the hell out of here and back to civilization.” It wasn’t only the comforts of civilization I wanted; I was worried about the Kristang civil war. Worried like, had the war stalled and were the lizards now all holding hands and getting along? Or, had the Kristang figured out that a third party sparked the war? While both of those were unlikely, they had such potential for disaster that I needed to know one way or the other. More importantly, if we couldn’t fix, build or get another starship, then humanity had no way of knowing about and dealing with f
uture threats. The Kristang troopship that Skippy had left in high Earth orbit was not capable of traveling between stars by itself, and it was wholly inadequate as a combat vessel.
“Plan for success?” Skippy mused. “I guess that makes sense, because if we don’t find a conduit, I don’t need any plans at all. All right, fine,” he said in a huff, “I am creating a snazzy presentation for you. Let me finish that, and I’ll show you what I found.”
“Can you give me a hint?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, Joe,” he said in an unhappy tone.
The beer can pinged me six hours later. “Hello, Joe,”
“Hi, Skippy. What’s up?”
“I have that snazzy presentation for you.”
“Huh?”
“Ugh,” he huffed disgustedly. “And you call me absent-minded.”
“Oh, yeah, wait. This is about all the derelict ships floating around out there in the, what did you call it, the junkyard?”
“Exactly. Are you ready to get smacked with the most awesome presentation you ever saw?”
“The most awesome? I don’t know about that, Skippy. When I was in the 10th Division our ‘Chairborne Rangers’ put together some very impressive PowerPoint slides. It was mostly useless crap, but you could tell they put a lot of time into it. In Nigeria, we had to hope the insurgents never got organized, because if they coordinated an attack on our forward operating bases, they would have overrun our perimeter before we got our PowerPoint slides done for the defense plan.”
“Is an over-reliance on PowerPoint slides unique to the US Army, Joe?”
“No, the ‘US Chair Force’ has the same problem, I think all large organizations do that. Anyway, what do you have for me? I am fully prepared to be dazzled.”
“Ugh, in that case, you will be disappointed. I was joking about an actual presentation, Joe. Uh, I can throw one together if you-”
“No! Just tell me, in your incomparable Skippy way, please.”
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 25
