Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “Bullocks,” Smythe said under his breath.

  “Also, because you just woke up a few hours ago, I am not fully convinced you are capable of making an informed decision about this. You can verify your wishes in five days.”

  “Five more days?” Smythe was aghast.

  “The new bionic legs won’t be ready for testing until three or four days anyway,” Skippy chortled gleefully. “Also, before you get out of that bed, I need to sedate you again, to insert the spleen and pancreas that I have been growing for you while you slept.”

  “You hear that, Smythe?” I grinned. “You’re getting a brand-new spleen!”

  “Well,” Skippy mumbled. “It’s more like a quality pre-owned spleen, because I used remnants of his old spleen to slap it together. Um, best to be careful with it for the first month. Or two.”

  “Sir,” Smythe looked up at me with an odd expression on his face. No, the expression itself was not odd. He was pleading with me. It was odd that he was doing it. “Must I do this? Isn’t the spleen one of those organs you don’t absolutely need?”

  This may shock you, but I know what a spleen does. It filters blood, removes old damaged red blood cells, and creates and stores antibodies and monocytes. The reason I know this is my cousin Ron injured his spleen in a car accident, and the doctors originally feared they had to remove it. “You don’t absolutely need legs,” I replied.

  “I meant-”

  “Smythe,” I continued. “Do you plan to live a nice quiet life after you get out of this hospital, or will you resume doing crazy shit as quickly as possible?” It wasn’t necessary to wait for him to answer, we both knew that he would say. “Normal people might not absolutely need a spleen. Special operators need all the backup they can get.”

  “Ah,” he sank back into the gel. “Skippy, describing my spleen as ‘slapped together’ is not a good way to build my confidence.”

  “Oops, sorry,” the beer can mumbled. “I should have said I grew a spleen for you. I grew it from the tiny squishy bits I dug out of you. Mostly from bits stuck to the inside of your suit. It is not a new spleen. But, it does come with our dealership’s renowned seventeen-point inspection program.”

  “Hey,” I winked. “If you can’t trust Skippy’s Quality Used Organs, who can you trust?”

  Smythe’s head slumped back into the gel. “Blood hell,” he gasped.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We chatted about the tactical situation, mainly about the problem of the ship’s AI actively trying to kill the crew and thwart our ability to do anything useful with our massive battlecruiser. Doctor Skippy probably would have advised that I not get his patient stressed by discussing issues Smythe couldn’t do anything about. That was bullshit. I knew Smythe. Not knowing what was going on would be more stressful for him. Now that he understood our status, he could think about what our next move should be. That would keep his mind happily occupied. Also, I really could use his advice, because I had no idea what to do after we picked up the remaining military personnel from Avalon.

  “Skippy,” I called him after I got to my cabin. “How is Smythe doing? He looks like hell.”

  “He should be dead, Joe,” our mad doctor answered defensively. “Part of the reason he survived was his excellent physical condition, so think about that the next time you feel like skipping the gym.”

  “Attaching bionic legs to him won’t cause too much stress?”

  “No, because I will not start the process until his body is able to handle the additional workload. For the next three weeks, he is going to feel like warmed-over crap. I can stitch him together, but all the stuff in his insides that are supposed to work nicely together, won’t. At first, the individual organs will be healing and will struggle to do their jobs. Once they are capable of doing whatever disgusting biological thing they do, the organs will need to work together. The healing process he will go through is no different from the post-surgical experience of any human, although Smythe will have the advantage of nanomachines monitoring and supplementing his natural abilities.”

  “Should you wait three or more weeks to attach his new legs?”

  “No. Much as I don’t like the idea of rushing him back into service, getting up to walk is the best thing for him right now.”

  “Ok,” I yawned. “Let me know how he is progressing. I don’t need details, just tell me if you are worried about anything. I’m going to get some sleep now.”

  “Excellent idea, Joe. Your new sheets are ready in the-”

  “I will be sleeping on the floor, in sweatpants, Skippy.”

  “But,” he was hurt. “The new sheets are perfect, completely inert. They took so much work to create! That damned native AI managed to corrupt the fabricators, so I had to-”

  “Telling me the new sheets were made by corrupted equipment does not boost my confidence, Skippy.”

  “Oh. Ok, good point. How about we pretend I didn’t tell you about that?”

  “How about I sleep on the floor, and you wake me up in five hours? Unless there is another emergency.”

  My blissful sleep on the floor did not last five hours. It did not last even one hour, because my slumber was interrupted by a dream. You might expect me to have a nightmare about being strangled again, particularly as my throat was numb from whatever scary medical stuff Skippy had done to me. That did not happen. My dream was about me using a pitchfork to round up all the sheets and towels, and making them march down a passageway and through a doorway. They tried to fight me when they realized the doorway was the inner door of an airlock, but I got them stuffed in there, blew the outer door, and savored my revenge as I watched those fabrics twist as they drifted away in empty space and-

  That jerked me awake. “Skippy! Skippy!”

  “Jeez, you’re supposed to be snoozing. How come you get to yell at me when I interrupt your sleep, but when you wake yourself up-”

  “Those sheets and towels, all that shit, what did you do with it?”

  “Ugh. I told you, I destroyed it all of it. What, you think I would try to sneak some of it back into circulation?”

  “No, I-”

  “Ok, so I did recycle part of it.”

  “WHAT?”

  “It’s fabric, Joe. Not all of it is constructed of fancy nanoparticles. Most of the material is as inert as the contents of your skull. The only dangerous parts were the nanoparticles capable of movement. Oh, and the ones that were able to store electrical energy. Plus the ones that directed the others, or transmitted-”

  “Very dangerous, yeah, I got that. What happened to the dangerous bits?”

  “Some of it, the truly vicious stuff that had been infected and could not be deactivated, was too hazardous to put into the fabricator raw material storage. They might infect the fabricators, again. I was tempted to dump that crap into reactor plasma, but if any of it stuck to the containment chamber and survived, we would be screwed. So, I vented it overboard.”

  “Huuuh!” I sucked in a breath. Just like what happened in my dream. “Overboard?! Where is that stuff now?”

  “In space. Duh. Man, sometimes you-”

  “Show me!” I ran over to the display on my cabin bulkhead. It was a sort of flat holographic tank.

  “Ok, fine, I will humor the monkey. Here is Valkyrie, and here is video of me taking out the trash. As you can see, it is not moving, dumdum. If you were worried about it somehow swimming through space and returning to the ship, you-”

  The video was what he said, of the hazardous material being vented overboard, on opposite sides of the ship. The clouds, shaped like half bowls, danced slightly as particles bumped into each other, but nothing was returning to the ship.

  That was not what I feared.

  “Where are those clouds now?” I demanded.

  “Um, still in space,” he explained slowly with a strongly implied ‘duh’. “Somebody seriously needs sleep. You-”

  “Show me where those clouds are now!” Fiddling with the display controls was of
no use, it just replayed the image I had already seen.

  The image zoomed out, changing only by Valkyrie at the center shrinking to a dot. The two clouds were still recognizably bowl-shaped but dispersed and thin. Theoretically, they would expand outward in opposite directions until they reached the edge of the universe.

  Yes, you Professor Nerdniks out there, I know the universe doesn’t have an ‘edge’. You know what I mean. Also, I know that the pressure of solar wind in the galaxy would break the clouds up, and they didn’t have sufficient velocity to escape the Milky Way’s gravity well.

  That was not what I cared about.

  What I did care about was the other dot on the display, near the edge of both the display and one of the nanoparticle clouds. “Nagatha!” I shouted. “Initiate immediate jump!”

  “Joseph?” Her confused voice rang loudly in my earpiece. “I cannot initiate a jump, I have the same restrictions as Skippy. What-”

  “Tell the duty officer Jump Option Sierra now now NOW!”

  I had a moment of panic, then the dot representing the Dutchman flared and disappeared.

  “Joe,” Skippy groaned. “What in the hell was that lunacy? Why would- Oh. OH!”

  Slumping forward against the bulkhead, I leaned on one arm. “You get it now?”

  His whisper was barely audible. “Yes.”

  “Did any of the contaminants reach the Dutchman?”

  “Because that is a very important question, I am going to run a careful analysis before I reply. The answer should be ‘no’, because I know the initial velocity of the particle clouds. However, it is possible the particles cooperated, to collide in a way calculated to boost the velocity of some particles, those sneaky little MFers. Um, it is possible that a small number of particles showered down on the Dutchman’s hull.”

  “Warn Nagatha.”

  “Already sent the message. She should receive it in nineteen seconds.”

  Our star carrier had not jumped far. Jump Option Sierra was a preprogrammed short emergency jump, just to get clear of an immediate danger. “Great.” Walking back to where I had been sleeping, I shrugged off my sweatpants, then remembered the door to my cabin was wedged open in case the native AI hacked the mechanism and tried to cut my head off. Pulling up my sweatpants, I scooped up my uniform and ducked behind a cabinet to dress.

  “Joe? You’re not going back to sleep?”

  “I’m not sleeping now, that’s for sure.”

  “Understood. Joe, how did you know?” He was mystified.

  “I didn’t.”

  “But-”

  “My subconscious mind knew, and was trying to warn me. I had a dream of throwing sheets and towels out an airlock.”

  “Shit. Damn it!”

  That made me freeze with my pants on only one leg. “What’s wrong?”

  “UGH! Even your unconscious monkey brain is smarter than me.”

  “Hey, don’t beat yourself up about it.”

  He sighed with relief. “Thanks, man.”

  “I plan to tell the whole crew, and they can beat you up about it.”

  “Oooooh, Joe, I hate you so much-”

  An exhaustive examination of the Flying Dutchman’s hull determined only a few hazardous particles had reached that ship, it still took seven exhausting hours to purge the star carrier of the contamination. Then Skippy and Nagatha continued scrubbing the digital viruses from both ships, a process that took four days. I say ‘viruses’, because they discovered there was more than one wave of viral attacks, more than one delivery method, and more than one way for the virus fragments to assemble themselves into deadly weapons. After four mind-numbing days of erasing viruses, only to find they had reassembled themselves, Skippy was tired and he was pissed off. “Ok, Joe,” he said through a damned good imitation of a yawn. “We are ready to restart the reactors. Should be at full power within thirteen hours, I am taking it slow and careful.”

  “You sure about that, Skippy? Maybe you should take a break first.”

  “Nah, I’m Ok. I had Nagatha analyze my functioning, and I am Okey-dokey except for really, really wanting to kill this ship’s AI.”

  The fact that he had asked Nagatha for help, and allowed her to poke around inside his head, told me how worried he was. “That AI has got you super pissed off, huh?”

  “Dude, you have no idea. I never fought an AI before. Well, there was that Elder AI on our renegade mission, but that thing was severely degraded and insane, and the battle was too short for anything other than brute force tactics. And on that same mission, I outsmarted a Maxolhx AI like the one controlling this ship, but back then, all I had to do was predict its reactions to a simple stimulus. Joe, I now have an answer to the question of why the native AI waited so long to act.”

  “Yeah, I was wondering about that. It is a Maxolhx system, yet it did nothing while we trapped a battlegroup outside the galaxy. If it attacked us while you were doing the chain-of-wormholes thing, it could have seriously screwed up the operation.”

  “The answer is, I think it couldn’t act at that time. It wanted to, but it hadn’t yet found a way around my monitoring and control. Now I realize that ever since we took this ship, that damned thing has been studying me. Watching me and Nagatha, and developing a surprisingly sophisticated model of us. It was able to predict what I would do. It has been watching and planning and patiently waiting to find a way around my control. Shit. I have never been so humiliated in my entire life.”

  “No? How about whenever a monkey thinks up a clever idea?”

  “Nah. I’m over that. There is something about biological intelligence that generates innovative ideas. Like I said, I outsource the task of dreaming up ideas to that sack of gray mush in your skull. But this ship’s AI is like me. In a very crude way, of course,” he hastened to add. “It bugs me that I nearly lost a battle of wits to an AI that rides on a physical substrate. Ugh. This makes me glad that I never contacted other Elder AIs through the Collective. They would be laughing their asses off at me right now.”

  “It was studying you? Is that why it waited so long to act?”

  “Yes. It could not risk acting until it knew my attention was elsewhere. Joe, the attack on the crew, when it tried to strangle you with a bedsheet, was just a diversion. If it had succeeded in killing you, that would have been a bonus, but not the focus of the attack. It attacked the crew to divert the attention of me and Nagatha. And it very nearly succeeded.”

  “Crap. Skippy, can we ever risk taking this ship into action?”

  “Wee-ewwww,” he let out an exasperated breath. “I do not know. It sucks that we have the most bad-ass ship in the galaxy, and we can’t trust it not to kill us. Joe, right now, I cannot guarantee some critical system would not lock up if we were to attack a Maxolhx ship. Before you ask me a bunch of ignorant questions, I am removing the native AI’s access to systems where failure would be catastrophic. Systems such as missiles, shields, reactors, the jump drive capacitors, the-”

  “Whoa. After you get done cutting the AI off from all that stuff, what will it be responsible for? A toaster?”

  “Um, well, that is a bad example, Joe,” he muttered. “Yesterday, I discovered that damned AI had hacked into the galley’s power feed. It was planning to electrocute anyone who used a toaster. Or a blender. Or, pretty much anything that uses electricity.”

  Slapping my forehead, I groaned. “We now have to be afraid of a toaster?”

  “No. No, Joe,” he chuckled. “You do not need to fear your faithful toaster.”

  “Oh, that’s great, Skip-”

  “You did need to fear it, until yesterday. But not now. Unless, you know, the ship’s AI outsmarts me again. Hey, maybe you stick to untoasted bread, until I can rebuild the galley’s power feed. Except, hmm, I had to cut power to the ovens, so you won’t be baking bread for a while.”

  I slapped my forehead. “Skippy, I have been sleeping on the floor of my cabin, in sweatpants, using a rolled-up sweater as a pillow. We can’t us
e the showers, because you are afraid a power surge to the on-demand water heaters could zap us with, like, a million volts. I’m keeping my cabin door jammed open, because you are afraid a power surge could slam the door closed and crush me. Most of the dropships are useless, because the virus wiped their control systems and you haven’t completed repairs yet. Please, please tell me you have some good news. Because otherwise, we are going to go back aboard the Dutchman, and send Valkyrie plunging into the nearest star.”

  “Don’t be hasty, Joe,” he pleaded. “You still intend to go back to Avalon?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Because, while we are flying there, you won’t be doing anything stupid like taking us into combat. Going on a nice, safe mission to Avalon means I can keep weapons and shields and other systems offline, so I can concentrate on installing new independent control systems for navigation and the jump drive.”

  “Cool. If that works, can you do the same thing with weapons?”

  “No. I used up much of our spares of those components, and I had to strip some stuff away from the Dutchman’s upgrades. Don’t worry, Nagatha is adjusting, it won’t affect her. Some of the components we need require exotic materials that the ship’s fabricators can’t manufacture.”

  “Of course they do. Wonderful.”

  “Maxolhx warships have access to an extensive network of shipyards and support vessels. They don’t need to carry a bunch of spare parts for every system. They also don’t have to worry their AI will try to kill them.”

  “Have you made any progress fixing that?”

  “Have you read my PowerPoint presentation about how I propose to modify the ship’s native AI?”

  “You know I did. You also know I talked with Nagatha about it.”

  “Yes, and I know that Nagatha recommended you approve the experiment.”

  “Calling it an ‘experiment’ is not a great way to sell your plan, Skippy.”