He pointed to his laptop and tapped the display. “Here’s an example. She’s a US Air Force tech sergeant, her specialty is maintaining V-22 Ospreys. There are no V-22 up there.” He pointed to the roof of the tent.
“There won’t be any V-22s flying down here, either, because we’re taking all the pilots with us. That tech sergeant can relearn which end of a rifle is dangerous, or she can retrain to maintain dropships. Think of it as our new ‘Blue to Green’ initiative,” I said. The original Blue to Green effort had been way back during the Iraq war, the second one. The US Army and Marines Corps had needed more boots on the ground, and so Navy and Air Force personnel had been offered an inducement to transfer services. The inducements were a carrot, with the stick being personnel draw-downs by the Navy and Air Force. Some people either transferred, or they were out.
I expected my new Blue to Green program to be just as popular as the first one.
“I’ve had all support personnel down here cross-training,” he agreed. “All right, Joe. I’ll take the Dutchman. Will Simms be your XO again?”
“Yes, and she’s not happy about it.”
“She and that Frank Muller guy are serious, I think. I haven’t pried into her personal life-”
“They are serious,” I confirmed. “She told me.” She had been angry when I announced I was pulling her off Avalon, to fly around the galaxy on an as-yet-undefined mission with no end date, and no realistic hope of saving Earth. At first, she had been angry with me, especially after she learned about all the people we had lost. Then, I guess she decided to be angry at the situation instead. Either because she did not blame me, or because blaming me wouldn’t accomplish anything useful. Simms was good at compartmentalizing her feelings. We had to work together as an effective team, so she might be saving her anger with me for after the mission was complete.
Or after it was clear we could not complete whatever the mission was.
Chang gave me sort of a side-eye. “The two of you can work together?”
I nodded once. “She’s a professional. And I need her. And she knows that.”
He closed his laptop and looked around the small tent, mentally packing it for departure. “What is the mission?”
“Working on it,” I replied. “I’m hoping we can use Valkyrie to somehow delay the Maxolhx attack against Earth, or hurt their ability to support a long-distance campaign against our homeworld. That is a loooong supply line,” I emphasized. “If we can make them question whether our little world is worth the effort, that buys time for us.”
“Buys time to do what?”
“To hope,” I said with an automatic shrug that was not appropriate. I needed to be more careful with my body language. “I meant-”
“I know what you meant, Joe. We’ve served together long enough. At this stage, hope is good enough. We’ve succeeded with less.”
Despite his words, he looked uncomfortable. “What is it, Kong?”
He looked away, pretending to study something on his laptop. I knew he was gathering his thoughts. “I’ve heard a rumor. About Valkyrie. You are not in complete control of the ship?”
“We’ve had trouble with the native AI,” I admitted. “Skippy is working on it. He has a plan,” I added.
“His plan? Or yours?” The way Chang asked the question, he was hoping the plan was mine.
I snorted. “His. Come on, all I know about computers is you press the power button. If it doesn’t boot up, I call someone.”
“You have confidence in this plan?”
A shrug was my answer. “Skippy does. Nagatha agrees it is worth trying. Otherwise,” I found myself clenching my fists. “We went through a lot of trouble, and lost a lot of people, for nothing.”
“That wasn’t your fault, Joe.”
“I keep telling myself that.”
“Does it seem odd that Skippy can’t control a simple Maxolhx AI?”
“It’s not a matter of control.” I was defending Skippy, and that was unfamiliar to me. “There’s only so much he can do, without destroying and replacing the thing. That substrate is integrated into the ship, in a way that would be tricky to dig out. We don’t have the substrate, the hardware, to build a replacement AI. If Skippy can’t get the thing to cooperate, or at least stop trying to kill us, we may go on a shopping trip for parts to build a replacement. It’s either that, or we all go aboard the Dutchman and drop Valkyrie into a star.”
“Shopping?” He raised a slightly amused eyebrow. “You mean stealing.”
“Unless you have a Maxolhx credit card, yeah.” I looked at his laptop. “How long before you can wind up things down here, and get everyone upstairs?”
“Three days,” he answered without needing to refer to notes. “I’ve been planning for contingencies since you left the last time. There isn’t a plan for pulling only the military personnel off this rock, but we can adjust. Are we taking Chotek with us?”
“No. I wasn’t planning to. You think we should?”
“I think we owe it to ask him,” Chang admitted. “He will decline the opportunity. His place is here now, one way or the other.”
“Ok, good. There is still the possibility that you could be using the Dutchman to transport humans from Paradise to Avalon, if that becomes necessary.” He knew I meant, if the situation became truly desperate. “We will need someone here working to prepare Avalon to be a viable colony.”
“Our crops are growing well,” he pointed outside the tent flap with a smile.
I had seen healthy fields of crops planted all around the main encampment. The fields had been expanded far beyond the size needed for experiments, the survey team was already growing much of their own food supply. “Good, because we’ll be taking a lot of the prepackaged food with us.”
“Is there any possibility of recruiting pilots and soldiers from Paradise?” He asked.
I shook my head. “Not unless we have no other choice. It would be almost impossible to conceal the missing personnel from the Ruhar. Plus if we ask people to come with us, and they say no, we can’t trust they won’t talk eventually.”
“That leaves us spread very thin. Five.”
“What?”
“Five. I only need five people aboard the Dutchman. Me, two pilots and the biologists.”
That surprised me. “That leaves you spread real thin.”
He grinned, but only with his mouth, not his eyes. “We’re not going into combat, remember?”
“Riiiiiight. You’re going to get lonely over there.”
“Our ships won’t be separated forever, will they?”
“Unless I’m taking Valkyrie into danger, we should be flying in formation.”
“Then our crews should be able to transfer between ships. Get a change of scenery, until you have to go into action.”
I had not thought of that. “Kong, that’s a great idea.”
He turned in his chair, bent down, and opened a small fridge under the desk. “Then let’s drink to another hopeless mission.”
“Uh,” I grimaced then wiped that expression off my face as quickly as I could. “That’s not ‘baijiu’, is it?” That Chinese beverage was similar to vodka, and I didn’t like vodka either.
“No,” he held up the bottle. “Japanese whisky.”
I hesitated as he set a plastic cup in front of me. “Technically, we’re on duty.”
“Joe,” he poured two fingers of liquid into my cup. “You need this.”
“Yeah,” I took a swig and it burned my throat, which was still sore from being crushed by a murderous alien bedsheet. “I do.”
After drinking whisky with Chang, I indulged in a glass of schnapps with Hans Chotek. It was a cliché that we drank schnapps, because he is from Austria, but that is my fault. The schnapps wasn’t his, I had it brought down from the Dutchman as a gift. “This is goodbye, then?” I asked, holding up my glass as a toast.
He shook his head. “I hope not. We should say ‘Auf Wiedersehen’. It means something like ‘Until
we meet again’.”
“Yeah,” I clinked my glass against his. “That’s better. You sure you won’t change your mind?”
“Come with you? No,” he tipped his head back and downed the last of the schnapps from his plastic glass. “You plan to fly around out there, smashing things? I can’t be of any use to you. No, it is best that I remain here, do what I can to get this world ready to support colonists. Whether they are from Earth or Paradise, they are going to need food. And some place to live.”
“If we’re able to bring people from Earth, we can bring supplies and equipment also. Anyone coming from Paradise will have only what they can carry with them,” I said knowing even that probably wasn’t true. If we pulled humans off Paradise, they would be bringing only what they could stuff into their pockets, because we would be jamming as many people as possible into each dropship. I hoped we never got that desperate. “Will you be Ok here?”
He gave me the tiniest of shrugs. “My colleagues still think that Skippy faked the order placing me in authority.” He referred to the secret UN order, created on Earth and not by Skippy, that gave Hans Chotek overall command of the beta site in case of emergency. I had just invoked that order. The other three UN Commissioners did not like him taking away authority they thought belonged to them, but, screw them. “I will be fine. We all will, if you come back here safely.”
“We will do the best we can. We have nearly fifteen months, at least, before the battlegroup is declared overdue. I have some ideas, that I’ve been discussing with Smythe, about how we can disrupt the Maxolhx without exposing our secret.”
“There is nothing you can do to help Earth?” There was a hopeful question in his words, but no hope in his eyes. He knew he truth.
“No. Not in the long run. Not that we can see. Even if we are successful in hitting the Maxolhx, throwing them into confusion, no way can they ignore the loss of an entire reinforced battlegroup. And no way can our one ship stop their entire fleet. Skippy wargamed the situation, at my request. In the best scenario, Earth has less than three years before aliens make the surface uninhabitable. Worst case, about two years.”
He looked at the schnapps bottle, decided against it, then changed his mind. “As you Americans say, ‘what the hell’.” He poured the fiery liquid for both of us. “We were so hopeful, once. We saved the world!”
“More than once,” I agreed. “Hans,” I used his first name and he didn’t object. “I’m sorry about this.”
“Circumstances were beyond your control. Skippy is correct. Ultimately, all we were doing was delaying the inevitable. Joe,” he held up his glass to me. “Good luck to you out there. Vaya con Dios.”
My last meeting on Avalon was with Doctor Friedlander. That was right after the three other UN Commissioners presented with me with a list of demands, and I diplomatically told them to go fuck themselves.
By the way, those were the actual words I used. After Armageddon, I was done taking shit from political hacks. Whatever authority the Commissioners once had, out in the wilderness of the universe, was meaningless after we got cut off from Earth. I told them they had two choices: help the science team with growing food on Avalon, or starve. Hans Chotek was in charge of the little colony, they could take their complaints to him. Even better, they could complain to each other. Either way, I didn’t care.
Anyway, after an unpleasant conversation with the Three Stooges, I was hoping that talking with Friedlander would cheer me up. I was wrong.
My first clue was the way he stormed across the dirt from the field where he had been working. It looked like he intended to punch me, and his fists were balled up.
I tensed. Hell, if the guy wanted to take a shot at me, I would let him. It was my fault that he was cut off from his family.
He stopped a few feet away, just outside punching range. “You son of a bitch,” he breathed.
“Hi, Doc,” I replied, holding my hands up.
His fists were clenching and unclenching. He was not going to punch me, but he wanted to. “When I heard a ship jumped into orbit,” he looked away.
“Sorry, Doc. You hoped we found a way back to Earth?”
“For a moment, I had hope. We all did.”
“Sorry about that. No, we haven’t.”
“Not yet,” he glared at me.
“What?”
“You haven’t found a way back to Earth yet. Have you tried?”
“We have tried. It’s impossible. There’s a blockade.”
“I know about the blockade. That shouldn’t stop the Merry Band of Pirates. ‘Impossible’ just means you need to think about it.”
“It’s complicated. We might run the blockade, but that would only shorten the time before the Maxolhx send another task force to Earth. You heard we trapped their battlegroup outside the galaxy?”
“I did.” His shoulder dropped. “Also heard about the people you, we, lost. Colonel, I-”
“Joe. Please.”
“Joe, I’m sorry. Those were good people.”
“They were.” There wasn’t much else I could say.
“What’s next?”
“Working on it. Doctor, would you like to come with us?”
He looked down at his mud-caked work gloves. “I’m keeping busy here.”
“You’re an engineer, not a biologist,” I appealed to him. “We have a Maxolhx warship for you to play with. Lots to learn up there.”
He was torn. “Would I be doing anything useful? Here,” he kicked a clod of dirt off one of his shoes. “I’m helping prepare this place for new colonists.”
“Doc-”
“Mark,” he insisted.
“All right,” I agreed. If I wanted him to call me ‘Joe’, I could use his first name also. “If we do find a way to Earth, we might not return to Avalon first. Coming with us is your best bet for seeing your family again.”
“Unless you get us all killed in some crazy scheme you dreamed up.” His words were harsh, but there was the barest hint of a twinkle in his eyes.
“Hey, so far, you haven’t been eaten by a giant lizard, right? I can’t make any more promises,” I forced myself to flash a grin at him. “There is one very important thing you can work on, aboard Valkyrie.”
“What’s that?”
“Thinking up how to get us back to Earth. I’m not doing all that shit by myself.”
He laughed. “Fair enough.”
Making an effort to be as diplomatic as possible, I was in the docking bay to meet the dropship that brought Simms up from the surface. Reed flew the Panther, leaving only a trainee pilot to fly Valkyrie, but we didn’t plan any maneuvers in orbit. And, we didn’t have many pilots fully qualified to fly the sophisticated Panther, so Reed was extra busy.
Reed was pissed at me too. That would give her and Simms something to bond over.
“Colonel,” Simms snapped a salute to me as she stepped onto the deck. “Permission to come aboard?” The way she said it was like ‘permission to perform a root canal on myself with a rusty screwdriver’.
I could not blame her for a lack of enthusiasm. “Permission granted. And, thank you.” I glanced at her eyes to see if her expression had softened a bit. Maybe. “I will show you to your cabin,” I offered. “You can get a tour of our new flagship later.”
“Flagship?” Simms said in that tone women use when they say ‘Oh really’?
“We have two ships now,” I shrugged defensively.
“Back when we had our frigate the Flower, we also had two ships,” she reminded me.
“We have two starships now. Maybe flagship is pushing it,” I admitted.
“I know what you meant, Sir.”
“Reed,” I leaned into the Panther’s door to call our chief pilot. “Come with us?”
“I’m kind of busy getting the Panther shut down,” she objected.
“Let your copilot handle that. It’s good training.” The truth was, I didn’t want to be alone with Simms just yet, and needed Reed as a social buffer. The
two of them liked each other and had worked well as a team. Simms and I needed to ease into a new working relationship.
“Ah,” Reed gave me a frustrated sigh. “Yes, Sir.” She stepped down onto the deck and handed me a bottle. “Compliments of Colonel Chang,” she explained.
It was a bottle of Japanese whisky. Hopefully, he had kept another bottle for himself aboard the Flying Dutchman. “I will thank him.” I gestured to the two women to walk with me. “We’ll stop by my cabin first, so I can put this away.”
My idea to bring Reed with us worked perfectly, proving I am a certified genius. While I walked ahead, Reed got Simms caught up on current events and pointed out features of our new warship. The two of them talking took all the pressure off me to keep a conversation going, and hopefully gave Simms time to adjust to the new reality. When we got to my cabin, I forgot how big it was, even compared to the spacious typical cabin aboard our battlecruiser. Turning toward Simms, I gestured toward the open doorway. “Uh, the cabins here are much bigger than the cubbyholes we had aboard the Dutchman. This one is too big, I chose it for proximity to the bridge and-”
They both squealed and burst out laughing, at whatever was behind me.
“What the-” I turned around to see what was so funny.
It was a bot. A robot that looked sort of like a bulky floor lamp with arms, and a basket on top. That bot we inherited from the previous crew, it was a Maxolhx device that Skippy had reprogrammed. He had to wipe its original programming as best he could, because the ship’s native control AI, which Skippy had not been able to replace yet, would have used the bots to murder all of us while we were sleeping.
The bot was not the problem. What the bot was doing was not the problem either, Skippy had tasked it for domestic duties like cleaning, laundry and light maintenance. The thing was taking clothing from the basket on its head and carefully putting the clothes away in bins that slid out of a cabinet on the bulkhead of my cabin. The bot was doing its job correctly, all the bins except the four it was using were secured, so they and their contents did not go flying around the cabin if the ship moved abruptly.
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 8
