“Do I even have to, Joe? I know you have been spying on the sensor data I’m getting from the Dutchman, so you can tell what I’m looking at.”
“Uh, maybe? Ok, yeah, I did. I was curious to know what you found out there; you said the search I did wasn’t very useful.”
“Your search wasn’t entirely useless, Joe, because it got me started on my own search.”
“Oh, good.”
“Other than that, your search was entirely useless. Seriously, what the hell were you thinking?”
“I was doing the best I could on my own, Skippy,” I answered defensively.
“You should have told me what you were doing.”
“I didn’t want to waste your time, until I saw whether there were any ships out there that were reasonably intact. If it was all broken bits and pieces I was going to drop the idea. And, yeah, I’d like to know your thoughts on whether anything out there will be useful to fix the Dutchman. I know what you’ve been looking at, and I know which floating pieces of junk you examined closely. What I don’t know is if you think it’s possible to rebuild the ship.”
“I don’t know that either, there is no way to be sure without, as you suggested, sending a dropship to look at each potentially useful piece of junk out there. What I can say, is, surprisingly I do think it might be possible to cobble together enough bits and pieces to construct a working starship. It would take many months, maybe more than a year, and the resulting ship would be a horrific Frankenstein monster; a true engineering nightmare. But it might, might, be possible.”
“Great!” I pumped a fist. “We should-”
“I said might. Do not get all excited yet, Joe. Before we can go flying around the system like freakin’ Tinkerbell, we need to land on Gingerbread and hopefully find a conduit. Because unless I can fix myself, I will hit Zero Hour before we could even begin duct-taping a starship together. I suggest you keep quiet about the possibility of rebuilding the Flying Dutchman, we don’t want to get people’s hopes up.”
“Wrong, Skippy. We need to tell everyone, precisely because that will give people hope. If people think our actions on Gingerbread might lead to us someday going home, they will work ten times as hard.”
“Are you sure, Joe? The science of group psychology suggests-”
“Skippy, you are a superintelligent AI, but I am a meatsack. Trust me, us biological trashbags work much better together if we have a common goal.”
“This is your pilot speaking,” the voice came over the cabin speaker. “We are about to hit the upper atmosphere shortly. Sensors are still telling us the atmo of Gingerbread is a breathable mix of oxygen and nitrogen, but the stealth field is fuzzing anything beyond twenty kilometers, so we’re not confident about anything yet. The sky below us is a mix of patchy clouds, which could mean the stealth field is concealing a Category Five hurricane down there; remain in your seats with harnesses securely fastened. In the pouch beneath each seat is a plastic bag, and that bag is not there for your shopping convenience at the Gingerbread gift shop. If we hit turbulence and you feel like you’re going to hurl, use the bag. Someone with the same name as you will be cleaning up the mess if you miss the bag, so take care to aim well.” There was a pause, then the pilot thought of something else important to say. “We know you don’t have a choice when it comes to flying the unfriendly skies, so thank you for flying Pirate Air.”
Personally, I appreciated his honesty.
There was not a Category Five hurricane below us, but once we penetrated the stealth field, we encountered an annoying phenomena Skippy called a ‘Fuzz Field’ that made our ship-to-ship comms fade away after a couple dozen kilometers. It also acted like a fog across the electromagnetic spectrum so we couldn’t see the surface until we were through the entry process, and got below about a hundred thousand feet altitude. Even then we could barely see the ground, but we could determine the atmosphere was breathable and temperatures moderate. We got our squadron of dropships flying in formation and selected a place to land quickly because we didn’t want to burn fuel flying around randomly. We needed a place to set up a temporary base camp, searching for a long-term settlement site could wait.
Chapter Fourteen
"Is this a good place for a campsite?" Adams looked around skeptically.
"It looks good to me," I couldn't see what she didn't like. The site where we had set down the dropships was at the top of a low, rounded knoll, with good views of the surrounding countryside in three directions. Most of the ground was meadows, with low-growing grasses and shrubs, so we didn't have to clear a lot of trees to make room for dropships and tents. Groves of trees were scattered here and there for shade, there was a stream less than a hundred meters away, and a breeze from the east cooled the air and kept bugs away. "What's wrong with it?"
She reached down a plucked a leaf off the ground. "These are deciduous trees," she paused to see if I knew what that meant. I nodded so she continued. "They lose their leaves. That means it can get cold here. Do you want to be here during a winter? We have no idea how harsh the climate can be at this latitude."
She had a good point. "I like the change of seasons," I mused. "The shelters are heated, and we can build cabins eventually."
"Build cabins, Sir?" She was clearly not buying into that concept.
"Yeah, why not? There are plenty of trees in the forests around here. We can use stones," I nudged a rock with my boot, "to make fireplaces."
"Sounds cozy," her tone of voice said the opposite.
"Come on, Adams. Where's your sense of adventure and romance? We can rough it over the winter like the pioneers did."
"Rough it like, trudging through deep snow to use the latrine?"
"Oh, that's not roughing it. I meant true suffering and deprivation."
Her eyes grew wide. "Like what?"
"No Netflix," I said with a wink.
"No- haha."
"Hey, the pioneers didn't have Netflix."
"Or wifi," she added. "I don't know how they survived."
"All right, you have a point that we don't know what winters are like here. If we are going to be stuck on Gingerbread long-term, we should understand the climate first. I'll ask Skippy to study that. In the meantime, we’ll set up a base camp here. We need to fly around to survey the planet; this place is a good as any to start from.”
“Good, Joe,” Skippy interjected. “Let someone else do the surveying, you should stay here. It wouldn’t be good for you to wander off into the woods and get lost.”
“Hey, I’m a soldier, and I spent a lot of time in the backwoods of Maine. I’m pretty decent at wilderness survival, Skippy.”
“Oh, sure, you’re a regular Crocodile DumDum.”
Setting up base camp was a lot of work, and somehow I got stuck assembling portable latrines. I tilted my head after the first one was ready. "This looks kind of like an oversized phone booth," I observed.
Major Smythe chuckled. "Colonel, how would you know what a phone booth looks like? You're too young to ever have used one."
"They have phone booths in Montreal. Or they did, a couple years ago.”
“Montreal?” Adams looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s in Canada. You know, the country north of the US?”
“That’s a separate country?” She asked with dry humor. “I always thought that was Baja Alaska.”
“Or North North Dakota. We," I laughed, "thought phone booths were advanced Canadian technology. Instead of having to carry a phone everywhere with you," I pulled out my zPhone and waved it, "just go to a phone booth!"
"That's not the full story about you and phone booths, Joe," Skippy said with a twinkle in his voice, if that was possible.
"Oh crap. Don't tell that story, Skippy."
Adams was not going to let that remark go by. "What happened, Sir?"
"Uh-"
"Joe thought he was Superman," Skippy chuckled.
I hid my face behind my hands. "You have to understand, Canadian Clu
b whisky is an evil, evil thing."
"Joe and his friends were bar-hopping and he decided it was too hot to wear long pants. So he went into a phone booth to change. Only he is not Superman. And he didn't have shorts to change into. And this phone booth didn't have a door."
"Yeah, and, you know how everyone says Canadians are all so polite?" I shook my head. "Those police officers were not so polite."
"I have never been that drunk," Adams declared with what I took to be a mixture of disgust and admiration.
"You don't ever want to be." Thinking about Canadian Club made me queasy. "The cops did let me go after I put my pants back on, but they made my friends take me straight back to the hotel. Anyway, I should stay out of Canada for a while."
"Probably a good idea, Joe," Skippy agreed.
“Hmmm,” I checked the setup instructions for the latrine, which was a Kristang device we took off their troopship. “It says here you can make the outside of this thing change color, even camouflage it.”
“Yes, Joe,” Skippy explained patiently, “there are options for multiple colors. For finishes, you can choose either matte or glossy,” Skippy explained.
“Matte and Glossy? I think they do mornings at Z107,” I grinned.
“What?” Adams asked with a laugh.
“You know,” I used my most jive DJ voices, “I’m Matt. And I’m Glossy, and this is Z107-FM’s Morning Zoo! Matt, a truckload of maple syrup spilled on Route Six near Vanceboro this morning. Thanks, Glossy, it sounds like a sticky situation, yuck, yuck, yuck.”
“Joe,” Skippy sighed while everyone else laughed, “did your mother drop you on the head as a child?”
“Nope, Skippy, I’m just like this.”
“I weep for your species.”
“Yeah, my uncle Edgar used to say that about me, too.”
Near the southern edge of the campsite, there was a crowd of people standing around, looking at something on the ground. Several of them had hands on their hips, or arms across their chests, both of which were bad signs. I walked over to find seven guys and Margaret Adams staring at a shallow hole in the dirt. “What’s up?” I directed the question at Lt. Williams, leader of our SEALS team.
“We were setting up this shelter,” he gestured toward the partially unfolded structure laying on the ground, “and we got three of the pins set to secure the corners. When we tried to drive in the pin here, we hit an obstruction. Moving the pin one way or another didn’t help. The problem is this rock.”
They had dug down about six inches to expose the top of the rock in question. This was not some red shale that could be flaked away with a pickaxe. This rock was gray and solid and already dirt was scratched away from shovels hitting it, exposing the light gray bare rock beneath the encrusting soil. This was a serious rock, and it was serious about making us go someplace else to set up a shelter.
“Can we dig around it, see how big it is?” I suggested.
“Or,” Adams pointed a short distance away, “we could move the shelter to the flat ground between those two trees. It’s like,” she squinted into the sun, “twenty feet?”
Since Adams’ proposal was clearly ridiculous, we ignored her. Taking turns with shovels, we found the edges of the rock after ten minutes of sweaty labor in the afternoon sun. Tossing my shovel on the ground, I considered the stubborn rock, taking off my UNEF baseball cap and scratching my head. “That is a damned big rock, it will take forever to dig this thing out,” I observed.
“Yeah,” Williams kicked the rock with a boot. “If we had a truck, or some kind of winch, we could pull it out.”
“Mmm hmm,” I agreed. “But we don’t.”
“We’re not using a dropship to lift it out, are we?”
“No,” I shot down that idea.
“Two people with powered armor-” Major Smythe began to suggest, but I cut him off.
“I don’t want to risk the suits we brought,” I stated. With limited space aboard the dropships, and fearing this may be a one-way trip in which food and medicine was more important than combat capability, we only brought eight sets of Kristang powered armor with us. We also had six Thuranin combots, and plenty of ammo for both weapon systems.
“So we give up?” Williams asked, disappointed.
“Oh, hell no,” I had known that rock for only ten minutes, and already I hated the stupid thing. I shook my head. “What do we have for explosives?”
“Oh my God,” Adams gasped. “You’ve got to be joking.”
Major Smythe rightfully ignored her. “There are those Thuranin grenades for the combots. We are running low on combots but we are well fixed for grenades.”
Adams threw up her hands in disbelief and walked away, shaking her head. I was familiar with the grenades Smythe mentioned. “Those grenades have a shape-charge setting, right?” I asked, already knowing the answer. “One of those should split this rock easily.”
“Perhaps,” Smythe cautioned. “We don’t know how deep this rock goes.”
“Well, I don’t want to dig down enough to find out. Let’s have a grenade do the hard work for us.”
Williams retrieved a grenade from the weapons locker of a Falcon dropship, and he and another SEALS placed it on the rock, using explosive-driven anchors to hold it in place. Then we evacuated the whole camp behind a slope just to the north, with the science team and some others questioning our sanity. “Fire in the hole!” Williams shouted, and remotely detonated the grenade. The ground shook slightly and there was a sharp cracking sound, then fine dust and pebbles rained down on our heads.
The result was, to say the least, a disappointment. When we gathered around the rock, this time with a larger crowd of curious onlookers, we saw a large split down the middle, and part of the top was missing. But the bulk of the stubborn boulder was still there, mocking us. Based on what we could see by shining lights down through the crack, I estimated the rock extended down five feet. Considering the roughly spherical shape with a diameter of five feet, and the average density of a granite-type stone, that made it, uh, five times, um, something about pi. It was really heavy. “Well, shit,” Now I really hated that stupid rock.
“With the crack going all the way down, we can fit a grenade in there now, set it for a dispersal blast,” Williams noted, pulling another grenade from his pocket.
“Those grenades have a variable yield?” I inquired.
“Yes, Sir,” Williams showed me the tiny dial on one end of the device, a dial sized for smaller Thuranin hands. “This one goes to eleven,” he pointed to the maximum indicator on the dial. “We could dial it down,” the look he gave me clearly was intended to dissuade me from taking that ridiculous suggestion.
“No,” I snorted. “I want this rock,” I kicked the stupid thing with the toe of a boot, “to die. I can hear it laughing at us.”
The camp was evacuated once more, with some louder grumbling that the whole exercise was a waste of time. Most of the grumbling came from women; by now all the men were eager to see what a Thuranin grenade could do to a solid rock.
Besides, it was, you know, majorly cool.
Eleven was a lot. The explosion, mostly contained by being inside the rock, had more force than I expected. One basketball-size chunk of rock went high in the air, and we had a brief moment of terror trying to guess where it would come down, before it arced over our huddled group and crashed into a tree behind us, knocking limbs off on its way to bounce along the ground.
“Whoohoo!” I high-fived several people, and I wasn’t the only one.
The steady wind blew the dust away from us, and we were able to approach the former rock’s position quickly. “Huh,” I said quietly. “That’s a big freakin’ hole.”
“Yup,” Williams agreed. The hole was ten feet in diameter and about six deep, with dirt thrown ten feet in every direction. The only sign of the rock was little pebbles collected in the bottom of the hole. As we stood there, more pebbles slid down the sides to the bottom. “Damn, Sir. It will take a while to fill i
n that hole so we can set the pin for the shelter.”
“That’s too much work,” I declared. “Let’s set up the shelter on the flat ground between those two trees,” I pointed about twenty feet away.
“UN-believable!” Adams shouted and stomped off in disgust.
“Women,” I said as I rolled my eyes.
“Good idea, Sir,” Williams agreed. “The trees will provide shade from the afternoon sun.” He held out a fist. “We showed that rock who’s boss, huh?”
“Oh yeah,” I bumped his fist. “We sure did.”
Gingerbread had the blessed advantage of gravity almost Earth normal, a welcome relief for the Merry Band of Pirates. The worst planet I had landed on, Jumbo, had gravity high enough that simply sleeping hurt because your body got sore from laying in one position for more than ten minutes. Surface gravity on Gingerbread was only two percent more than on Earth. You might think a two percent difference would not be noticeable and maybe the extra strain I felt was all in my head, but we all felt it. After being in zero gravity aboard the stricken Dutchman, then coasting through space in dropships without artificial gravity, every one of us was feeling the effects of muscle atrophy. We took fancy Thuranin drugs that supposedly counteracted some of the damage from long-term zero gravity, but when we landed on Gingerbread, my legs wobbled. For the first two days I was getting my strength back, and on the third morning I went for an easy run with the Indian team. Or, it was what Captain Chandra described as an easy run, a mere ten kilometers over relatively flat ground along a river.
When I was in high school, I suddenly decided, because I am thoroughly an idiot, to run a marathon. A woman my mother worked with had qualified for the Boston marathon and she was going to run it the next April; the whole town was excited for her. So, when school started that year, I began training for a marathon. To make a long story short, I did everything you shouldn’t do like piling on the miles too fast. Then I twisted an ankle playing football in the third game of the season, so that ended my epic quest for distance-running glory.
Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5) Page 26
