“How’s this working on your end, Kong?” I asked.
“Much better,” he had reported that the holograms of us, that he was viewing from the Dutchman, were disturbing.
“Great. Uh, hey,” I suddenly had an unpleasant thought. “My hologram on your end is me, right? Not a monkey, or a clown?”
“It is you, Joe,” Chang assured me with a laugh.
“Ok, let’s get started.” I wanted to keep the meeting short because I knew Smythe was uncomfortable. He was still using two canes. No, sorry. He was using basically ski poles, with rubber tips on the ends. And he didn’t walk so much as lurch from side to side, swaying his hips left and right. The knees did not yet bend correctly, and it looked like his own nerve signals and the computer controlling the bionic legs were not talking to each other in perfect harmony. He stumbled sometimes, in a way that I thought was caused by the legs moving in a way he did not expect. Getting control of his new, hopefully temporary, legs was going to be a painful and frustrating process.
The good news is that integrating the new legs gave Smythe something to do, and he was attacking the challenge with the same dedication and determination that had gotten him into the Special Air Services, then appointed as the commander of STAR Team Alpha. Seeing him working up to sixteen hours a day to integrate his new legs, and to recover the strength, fitness and coordination of the rest of his body, had gotten me worried that he was pushing himself too hard.
So, I had asked Skippy about it a couple days ago. “Don’t worry, Joe. He can’t hurt his new legs. He was overdoing the exercises in the gym. As his doctor, I warned him that he risks damaging his internal injuries, which are still healing. He requested that I monitor him through the nanomachines in his blood, and notify him when he is pushing too hard. Also, I told him that if he does not get at least eight solid hours of sleep each night, I am simply going to deactivate his legs, and knock him out right there, even if that means he sleeps in a passageway.”
“Wait. You can really make him go to sleep?” I did not like that idea. “Can you do that to any of us?” Skippy making the Thuranin crew go into sleep mode is how we had captured the Flying Dutchman. At the time, I thought it was an awesome trick. The idea of him being able to do that to us was not so awesome.
“No, dumdum. I can do that to Jeremy, because I am his doctor and he still has a medical pump attached to his left side. I use that pump to monitor his blood chemistry, and to administer whatever cocktail of chemicals and biomimic substances like hormones he needs at the time. I can make him sleepy, and assure that he gets deep, restful sleep.”
Hell, getting deep, restful sleep sure sounded like a good deal to me. “Ok, thanks.”
“Joe, I really am doing the best job I can for my patients.”
“That’s great, we apprec-”
“Even if I do find their meatsack monkey bodies dis-GUST-ing.”
“Yeah,” I thought of how I had been kept awake the previous night, burping because the lasagna I had for dinner had too much garlic. That had been an uncomfortable night. “There are downsides to being a meatsack.” Then I remembered that lasagna had been DEE-licious. “There are also a lot of good things about being a meatsack.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Anyway, Smythe was in the meeting, eager to participate. As a symbol that I considered Smythe to still be our STAR team commander, I had not invited Kapoor to the meeting. He was much too busy with training the new team, and, truthfully, I didn’t know him well enough to decide whether his input would be useful to me. Smythe was there because I valued his experience and judgment, not his physical skills.
“The first, well, only item on the agenda is the status of moving the Sleeping Beauty wormhole.” I briefly explained why that wouldn’t work, but Skippy thought he could move the wormhole he called ‘Backstop’. “The problem,” I added, “is that wormholes can only be moved when they are dormant, so we don’t have any guarantee that it will wake up and operate properly after the move.”
“A dormant wormhole might remain dormant?” Chang asked. “Then, we do not lose anything if it fails to reactivate?”
“We lose time,” I emphasized. “We could try again to move a different dormant wormhole, but that would take time we don’t have.” Then I told them the bad news.
“Skippy,” Smythe spoke first, his voice still hoarse. “How certain are you that Gateway must be disabled before you can begin moving Backstop?”
“One hundred percent,” the beer can boasted with confidence. “The local network showed me the future configuration of the area after Backstop is moved. Gateway will be open, and I won’t be able to control it for six months, or longer. Gateway will reboot to its original parameters. Unless, I take it offline, permanently.”
Smythe cocked his head and arched an eyebrow, which told me that the old Smythe was coming back. “How certain are you the network will allow you to, essentially kill, an active wormhole?”
Shit. I should have asked Skippy that question. If he answered that he didn’t know, I would look like the fool that I am. Luckily, fortune was on my side that morning.
“No problemo,” Skippy sniffed. “The network actually has been wanting for a while to shut down Gateway, because of the damage I have caused. If it does get rebooted, it will still be functioning at reduced capacity. I proposed taking Gateway offline, and the network agreed. The network can’t make that decision by itself, but it will accept my command.”
The discussion went on for about forty minutes, with Nagatha joining to tell them what she had told me: the decision is obvious. And, that is what the staff agreed unanimously, exactly as I expected.
“Gateway gives us zero chance to help protect Earth,” Simms summed up the argument. “This Backstop, if it works, could save thousands, maybe a hundred thousand people, before the Maxolhx get to Earth. It’s the best of a bad set of choices.”
Immediately following the meeting, I gave the order to set course for Backstop, and began jumping.
Immediately after giving that order, I said a silent prayer that I had not killed humanity by making another stupid and reckless decision that seemed great at the time.
In the passageway, Simms was waiting for me. That’s why she was so valuable as an executive officer: she knew what I was thinking. “Moving Backstop near Earth is the right decision, Sir. It’s an inspired idea, brilliant,” she said without a trace of flattery. When Simms gave you a compliment, she meant it. “So, what’s wrong?”
“Screwing with wormholes to create shortcuts across the galaxy also was the right decision at the time. So was jumping the ship through an Elder wormhole, and a whole lot of other shit that seemed like it was a good idea at the time, and then blew up in our faces. I’m worried about what we don’t know.”
“We do know the Maxolhx are inevitably coming to Earth, and we can’t stop their entire fleet,” she replied gently. “Sir, we don’t have to commit now. You don’t have to make a decision until we reach Backstop, and Skippy communicates with it. We have plenty of time.”
We did have plenty of time, until we didn’t.
“Joe!” Skippy barked at me. “Everything is ready, we are all waiting on you. I swear, this is like hiding in a living room for a surprise party, while the guest of honor is standing in the driveway with his car door open, trying to decide whether to go in the house or use the Taco Bell coupon that expires next week.”
“Ok, Skippy, I get the idea.” He was right. Everyone was waiting on me. We had flown to and located the Backstop wormhole. Skippy talked with it and determined it was in excellent condition, just dormant. The network was ready to accept his command to begin moving Backstop. The network was also ready and actually eager, to disable Gateway. We received good news that, instead of having to fly all the way to Gateway, disable it and then fly to Backstop again to initiate the move, the network could remotely disable Gateway from where we were. Hearing that got me excited at the prospect of remotely disabling other wor
mholes across the galaxy, but Skippy burst my bubble on that. Because Gateway was damaged, it was a special case. The network already wanted to disable that wormhole, all it needed was proper authorization, and Skippy had the authority. Or he could fake it, I didn’t care either way. “We are ‘Go’. Move the wormhole.”
“Excellent! Will do, right after you tell me which bullshit story you cooked up, to persuade the network that it should move the wormhole.”
Crap. I had forgotten all about that little nagging detail. The entire bridge crew was looking at me, and I was totally unprepared. “Uh,” think fast, Joe, I told myself. Like that was ever gonna happen-
Huh.
I did think fast.
“Because you’re the Daddy and you say so,” I suggested.
“What?”
“You are a God-like Elder AI,” I suppressed my gag reflex, “and it is just a local network controller. It has no right to question your instructions, unless you harm the network, right?”
“Um, yessss,” he drawled slowly while he considered. “That actually will work.”
“But? I sense a ‘but’ in there.”
“But, I don’t want to play that card unless I really need to. Every time I give instructions that fall outside the network’s normal mode of operation, I give the controller another reason to lock me out.”
“Ok, then we go with Plan B. Tell the controllers that you need wormholes moved within their local networks, to optimize the future configuration of the overall system in the galaxy.”
“Wow. How do you know what is the optimal future-”
“I don’t, Skippy, it’s just bullshit. Each controller is only responsible for its local section of the galaxy, right? Who is responsible for the overall system?”
“Um, Jeez, I guess there is, or used to be, an Elder AI assigned to handle that.”
“An Elder AI, like you?”
“I don’t see why not. Sure. What the hell, I’ll give it a shot.”
He did. The local network controller questioned his instructions, but it also began preparations for moving the Backstop wormhole, exactly as we wanted.
Sometimes, it’s best to just bullshit your way through a situation. By the time the other realizes you were lying, it no longer matters.
I hoped it would no longer matter, when we got all the wormholes moved where we wanted.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After we, or to be accurate I should say Skippy, got the Backstop wormhole moving, we flew around to get other wormholes moving. Skippy’s original estimate was we needed to move six wormholes to create a shortcut route from Earth to the super-duty wormhole that connected way out to the Sculptor Dwarf galaxy. After examining the individual wormholes, he realized the original route wasn’t going to work because one of the wormholes was not just dormant, it had been disabled by that local network. The explanation was something about a black hole that had passed through the area eight thousand years ago had caused part of the force line to become ragged, and reopening the wormhole would not allow the force line to knit back together. Whatever. All I cared about was that Skippy then decided we had to move eight wormholes to create a route. The good news was the other seven wormholes, besides Backstop, were dormant in the normal manner and there should be no problem with moving them. And, bonus, the route through eight wormholes actually yielded a shorter transit to the beta site. No, that’s not right. Using eight wormholes meant going a third of the way across the galaxy, like going around your ass to get to your elbow. It was shorter in terms of what mattered to us; the distance starships had to travel between wormholes. How far two ends of a wormhole were apart didn’t make any difference to us, the transitions were all instantaneous as far as filthy monkeys could tell. Anyway, the time to get from Earth to the beta site was shorter with Skippy’s complicated cornfield maze of wormholes, and that was all good for us.
What was the bad news, you want to know?
Really, there wasn’t any bad news. Sure, we had to fly around willy-nilly going forward and sometimes backward, to get to the other seven wormholes. That took time and it took us away from our role of being a fearsome ghost ship threat, but it was also an opportunity. Along the way, we took detours to pop up in unexpected parts of Maxolhx territory.
Without taking on any risk to ourselves, we were reminding the kitties that we hadn’t gone away, and they would never know where we would appear next.
Following Skippy’s advice, I started reading his narrative about the Alien Legion’s mission on the planet Fresno, where they barely escaped from a deathtrap. They escaped, I noted, without any help from their supposed allies the Ruhar. That incident confirmed my opinion of the hamsters, that they were generally decent people and humans might someday be actual allies with them. But they had become cynical from their experience in the endless war, and their government was not going to risk their own people to save primitive humans. If humanity was going to survive, we needed to save ourselves. Somehow.
When we first heard of the Deathtrap mission, I had read a summary of the after-action report Perkins sent to UNEF-Paradise. It was a typically dry, matter-of-fact account of the events on Fresno, and I had gotten the impression there was a lot more to the story than what she put in the report. Now, thanks to Skippy pulling together all the reports, communications, battlefield video and anything else he thought was relevant, I could read the details, focusing on the actions of the Mavericks. It was weird reading about people I knew, like Perkins, Ski, Shauna and Cornpone.
The story was interesting, so much that I brought my tablet to the gym and continued reading while riding an exercise bike. Walking back to my cabin for a shower, I was confused about something in the narrative. Why were Jesse and Shauna consistently referred to by their rank, but Dave was mostly called ‘Mister’ instead of-
Oh.
The realization got me jogging along the corridor to my cabin, where I closed the door behind me. It took a while to get over nearly being strangled by my freakin’ bed, and it was partly as an example to the crew that I was back to sleeping on the bed, with the door closed. Still, I didn’t use any sheets or blankets, I slept in sweatpants, socks and a T-shirt. That was better anyway if there was an emergency. Besides, I slept alone. While that sucked, it was convenient.
No, sleeping alone just sucked.
“Skippy! I see why you wanted me to read this.”
He appeared on the back of the couch. “I wanted you to read it, so you would know what happened to your old friends, and understand-”
“Yeah, that’s all great. You wanted to me to read about Dave and Emily.”
“Emily? You mean Lieutenant Colonel Perkins.”
“You know what I mean. Those two are a couple. Dave quit the Army; he is now a contractor working for the Mavericks. Shit, I wonder what UNEF thinks about that?”
“UNEF-HQ on Paradise is not happy about the situation. They are also realistic. Emily and Dave are not the first couple to serve together in that force.”
“Sure, but they are not serving together. She is his commanding officer.”
“Technically that is not true. Dave is a security contractor, responsible for training.”
“Riiiight. It only looks like he is doing the exact same job as a US Army sergeant.”
“Hey, I didn’t make the idiot rules you monkeys make yourselves follow.”
“Those rules are-” I was about to say the rules are there for a reason, but over the years, I had learned that many of the official regs just did not apply to a group of Pirates racing around the galaxy. It was getting harder and harder to justify applying archaic rules, written on a planet we might never see again. “Anyway, that is what you wanted me to see, right? That Emily found a way around the regs?”
“Actually, she didn’t. She heard about another couple in UNEF who found a creative solution to get around the rules, and she followed their example.”
“Uh huh. Listen, you think this would work here? Like, I am speaking purely about a
hypothetical situation, understand?”
“Purely hypothetical, got it,” he gave me an exaggerated wink.
“Ok, so, let’s imagine that someone like, oh, Gunnery Sergeant Adams had romantic feelings for someone above her in the chain of command.”
“Hmmm. Who would that lucky guy be?”
“Uh, for the purpose of discussion, let’s say he is Smythe.”
“Smythe? Dude! Seriously?”
“This is all hypothetical, remember?”
“Ok, sure, whatever,” he grumbled.
“All right. Can you imagine Smythe suggesting to Adams that she quit the Marine Corps, and the Merry Band of Pirates will hire her as a contractor. Do you see the problem?
“Shit, yes. That would not go well.”
“Exactly. The Marines are her family.”
“What about the opposite? What if you, I mean, Smythe, resigned his Army commission?”
“That wouldn’t work. We can’t have a civilian leading a ship, I mean a STAR team.”
“Ugh. Forget all this hypothetical shit, Joe. Count Chocula is a civilian, and he was the mission leader.”
“I-” Damn. There was a fantastic argument I had planned, and poof, it was gone from my head. “Huh.”
“Why couldn’t you be a civilian, and someone like Simms command the military crew?”
“Shit, I- Take off my uniform?” I looked down at my T-shirt and gym shorts. The shirt was gray with ARMY across the front on black. I was proud to wear that shirt. It was a big part of my identity. As much as I hated the bureaucracy and the bullshit confusing regulations, the Army was my family. I was damned proud to be part of the Big Green Machine, which was one of the Army’s recent marketing slogans. No way could I imagine myself wearing a suit.
“Yes. Or, you can forget all this irrelevant shit, and just be Pirates.”
“It’s not that easy, Skippy.”
“It is that easy, knucklehead. I am not giving you advice, but, if your choice is between wearing a uniform, and something else you want, what will you choose?”
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 31
