Of the eighteen humans we took from the Dodo, twelve were immediately enthusiastic about joining the Merry Band of Pirates. They heard ‘going home’ and were all-in. None of the twelve had significant long-term ties to Paradise, and were eager to see their friends and family on Earth. Four others had mixed feelings about being Shanghaied. They figured there was more to the story than what we initially told them, and didn’t believe that humans had been flying around the galaxy causing havoc on our own.
The remaining two were very much not happy about essentially being kidnapped. Both were guys on the French team. One of them had a girlfriend on Paradise. The other guy had married a woman on Paradise, and she was due to have their baby in two months. I truly felt sorry for that guy, and nothing I said could console him.
“You are taking me away from my wife and child,” he glared at me.
Before I could respond, Commandant Fabron intervened. “Gaston,” he used the guy’s first name to establish rapport. “Colonel Bishop is not taking you away from your family. The war is taking you away. You could have been killed out here. Or on any nameless planet we do not know or care about. If this mission fails, the Thuranin will deliver a bioweapon to Paradise, and kill everyone. Including Catherine and your son.”
Gaston was no longer shooting daggers at me with his eyes, he also was not happy. “My son will grow up without me. Never knowing me.”
“That’s not completely true,” I said without thinking. Shit. So far, we had told only the good news to the Paradise people. They didn’t know that Earth was inevitably doomed, that our best hope was to pull thousands of people to safety, and abandon billions to a terrible fate. We were giving info a little bit at a time, in bite-sized chunks, to avoid overwhelming them. Like, we had told them that we had help from an advanced AI, but we hadn’t told them the nature of that AI, and Skippy had not spoken to them yet. “Listen,” I checked Gaston’s nametag because I wasn’t going to use his first name. He wore three stripes, that was a staff sergeant in the US Army, but I couldn’t remember the equivalent rank in French terms. NATO code OR-6, that was uh, yeah. “Sergent-chef Paschal. Our best estimate is that, within two years, the secret of humans flying around the galaxy will be exposed.” They might be able to guess that was bad news for Earth, I would let them reach that conclusion on their own. “At that point, you can go back to Paradise. If that’s possible, you understand? I can’t make any promises. A lot can happen in two years.”
“A single day can be fateful,” Fabron muttered.
“Sorry about today,” I said truthfully. “It wasn’t by choice.”
Fabron raised an eyebrow. “Colonel, I meant Columbus Day.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course. Paschal, Commandant Fabron spoke the truth. If we don’t stop the Thuranin, every human on Paradise is at risk.”
Pascal stiffened. He looked to Fabron and nodded with a gesture so curt it was almost imperceptible. “Colonel Bishop, you will take the fight to the Thuranin?”
I knew what he meant. He wanted to hit the aliens who were threatening his family. “We are taking the fight to any aliens who need to get their asses kicked. There are a lot of them, and we can’t do it alone, Sergent-chef. Are you with us?”
His answer was to click his boot heels together and snap a salute to me. “I would like to kick some ass, Sir.” In his French accent, what he said was almost funny, but there was nothing humorous about the determined expression he wore.
“Polish up your ass-kicking boots, Paschal,” I told him. “It’s a target-rich environment out there.”
The Ruhar liaison officer was never going to cooperate with us. She was a prisoner of war, and all we could do was treat her as well as we could, and wait until we could send her back to her people. We couldn’t do that until it no longer mattered that aliens knew humans were flying starships, so she was going to be waiting a long time. I mean, hopefully we could keep our secret for another year or two.
The Commando team was either pumped up about joining us, or at least willing to do their duty. That was, until they learned the full truth. That night at dinner, I planned to give them a briefing on the strategic situation, and to introduce them to both Nagatha and Skippy. It was best they learn the unvarnished truth now, rather than in the middle of the rescue operation. I needed them to be focused and fully committed. If any of them were going to bail out, it was best to get that over with, before we invested a lot of time and effort in training them up for the op.
The Jeraptha was a totally different story. He was a beetle, sure, the first I had ever met face to face. Cadet-Undercandidate Yula Fangiu was last to come out of the Dodo, and he had looked neither angry nor happy. The guy, he was a male of his species, seemed to think the whole thing was a grand adventure. With the Ruhar escorted away, and Smythe addressing the Commandos, I invited Fangiu to the Flying Dutchman’s conference room. He gawked at everything along the way, to the point where I needed to drag him away from various things that he wanted to inspect. I assured him there would be plenty of time for him to get a tour of the ship later. “Colonel Bishop, I have never been inside a Thuranin starship before.”
Remembering when I had first stepped aboard the ship that became our Flying Dutchman, I could sympathize with him. Actually, because we had just captured the ship and I was afraid someone or something would take it away from us, I do not remember spending much time in sight-seeing. What I remember is being anxious to the point of terror, and hoping my new crew didn’t see how scared I was. Damn. That was so long ago, it felt like it had all happened to another person, not to me. A whole lot of stuff had happened since then.
We finally reached the conference room, where he arranged two chairs so he could sort of sit down. That reminded me to ask Skippy if we could fabricate proper furniture for our unexpected guest. Also to ask what we needed to do about his other needs. Could a beetle use the showers in the ship’s cabins, or did we need to modify one of those also?
“Cadet Fangiu,” I began. ‘Cadet-Undercandidate’ was too much of a mouthful to say every time. “I am sorry about taking you away from your people, and I promise we will return you-”
“Do not be worried, Colonel Bishop. This is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me. This is the only exciting thing that has ever happened to me!”
My reply was an insightful and intelligent “Uhhh-” Score one for humans, I was surely making my species look good. Not.
“My rank is Undercandidate Cadet, because I have not yet been accepted as a cadet. I just recently completed initial flight evaluation, and am, or was, waiting for an assignment to primary flight school. The reason I volunteered to fly with the Alien Legion team was my father thought it would look good on my personnel file. Also, because I had nothing else to do while I waited for a flight school slot to open for me. No one else,” he twisted his mandibles in what he might have been intended as a grin, “wanted the assignment.”
“Because it takes you away from home?” I guessed.
His antennas lifted. Was that surprise? Sarcasm? There was a Ruhar guide to body language of various species and I read it a while ago, now I wished I had studied it more recently. “No one else wanted to fly with humans because most of my people were afraid your pilots would crash into an asteroid. Also, your species smells,” his mandibles twisted. “Interesting. No offense.”
“None taken. Hey, to us, Kristang smell like, burnt toast or something like that.” Without taking in a sniff to make it obvious, I breathed in slowly through my nose. Most of Cadet Fangiu was covered in a flexible material similar to a Ruhar skinsuit, so the only exposed parts of him were his head, what I guessed was his neck, and the claws of two forelimbs. There wasn’t much of his leathery skin exposed to the air, and I had to concentrate. In the docking bay, there had been a scorched smell, like burning plastic. That came from the hull of the Dodo, it was not unusual for dropships to emit an acrid smell when they came back to the ship. Especially when they had plunged through an atmosphere, o
r been baked by the local star. The Dodo had been operating in the system’s asteroid belt, far from the star, so the scorches on its hull came from the radiation of the Flying Dutchman emerging from a jump wormhole right on top of the dropship.
In the conference room, I had noticed some of that distinctive smell lingered, and I wondered if it had soaked into my hair and uniform while I was in the docking bay. Now I realized part of the smell was coming from Fangiu. It actually was not unpleasant. There was a scent like paper left in the hot sun, and a combination of coconut oil and, maybe nutmeg? I think. Really, it smelled like being at the beach and eating apple muffins, that’s the best way I can describe it. That made me anxious about what I smelled like to him.
“Urk, urk, uuurk,” he shuddered with a raspy, wheezing laugh that made the hair on my arms stand on end. “The stinkiest species I have ever encountered is the Bosphuraq. Whee-ew, their stench is foul.”
Smythe had told me what the moon crawler vehicle smelled like, when his team had stolen one from the birds. Because I was aboard the Dutchman for that part of the moonbase mission, I had fortunately missed that delightful experience. Giving Fangiu a grin that I hoped he knew was friendly body language, I laughed. “Anyway, I apologize for taking you away from flight school.”
“No need to apologize! You have already won a wager for me.”
“Uh, I did?”
“Yes! When the ghost ship attacks were first reported, actually,” his antennas dipped low over his eyes. “After the second attack. Or maybe the third. After you hit the convoy?”
“That was our third attack,” I told him without needing to refer to the data on my laptop. Every one of those attacks was burned into my memory. Not just because of the violent action, but because we practiced each action over and over in simulation, then ran ‘What-If’ scenarios based on our after-action report, to see what we could have done better.
“After that attack, I placed a prop bet.” He stopped and looked at me. “Do you need me to explain what a ‘prop bet’ is?”
“No,” shaking my head, I thought about my Uncle Edgar. He loved to place side bets during games, especially during a big event like the Super Bowl. A prop bet is about something other than the result of the game. Stuff like, will the AFC team score more or less than X points in the first half? Or how many TV commercials will be shown in the third quarter? You could place money on wagers like that, without caring or even knowing who won the game. The idea of a prop bet was not unusual, what I didn’t understand was what ‘game’ the beetle was talking about. “What was this prop bet you made?”
“It was about whether the ghost ship was truly controlled by a rogue faction of the Bosphuraq, or some other force.”
“You bet on that? Wait!” I had a sickening feeling. “You bet that humans were flying this ship?” If the Jeraptha were somehow speculating that filthy monkeys were involved in the unusual and unexplained events going on in-
“No.” Fangiu’s antennas bobbed jerkily side to side, in a gesture I remembered was their way of indicating humor. “I merely wagered that the official story of a rogue Bosphuraq faction was not true. Many of my friends thought I was foolish to wager that the Maxolhx were wrong. They told me, the senior species have access to the best data and analysis, how could they be wrong? Ha, ha,” he wheezed with laughter, and it sounded like a tin can caught in a blender.
Keeping my instinct to cringe in check, I pressed him for information. “None of your friends bet that humans were responsible?”
“No,” he found that question amusing. “Your people were not even on the list of options, as I remember. None one would- Eh!” He inhaled with a whistle. “Oh, if someone did wager on humans, he would clean up! He would be a legend! Ooh, that lucky bastard.”
It was such a relief that our secret was still safe, that I missed whatever he said next. To cover, I grunted and nodded. “That would be a lucky bet, yeah.”
“Colonel?” He cocked his head at me, his antennas bent in a ‘U’ shape. “I asked, how many Maxolhx ships have you destroyed?”
“Why?” I tried to joke. “Did you bet on that also?”
The earnest look on his face told me the subject was no joking matter.
“What,” I asked, “was the over/under?”
“Fifteen.”
“Fifteen?” That surprised me. “That low? Wait. You mean fifteen after the third attack?” Our tally at that point was only, uh, two plus one plus five. Eight.
“No. Fifteen total. Before the ghost ship is caught, destroyed, or just, stops.”
“Stops?”
“You can’t go on forever, can you? The Maxolhx are throwing more ships into the fight. Unless you have an unlimited source of spare parts,” he used his antenna to shrug, or that’s what it looked like to me.
“We have spares,” I said cautiously, not sure how much I wanted to tell him. Although, what did it matter how much he knew? He wasn’t going to tell anyone, until it no longer mattered to us.
“The wager on how many ships you destroy expires after one year. One year on our homeworld, that is about,” he closed his eyes trying to remember trivial information. “Fifteen months on Earth. Colonel, I ask because the Maxolhx of course do not release accurate information about their losses. Their fleet is so powerful,” he shuddered slightly, his antennas twitching. “It is hard to believe any of their ships could be lost in battle. Have you destroyed more than fifteen of their ships?”
Before I answered, I wanted to know a little more about him. “Did you bet on the over, or the under?”
“Over. You destroyed more than fifteen ships?”
“You might say that,” I tried to be casual about it while humble-bragging. “Our current count is forty-two.”
“Forty-two?”
Technically, a couple of the ships in my count had been self-destructed, but they still counted in the ‘W’ column as far as I was concerned. The kitties sure counted those ships as losses. “Yeah. The Maxolhx set a trap for us, but we ambushed them instead,” I indulged in a bit of bragging on behalf of the Merry Band of Pirates. “They lost fourteen of twenty ships in that one fight. We got away with minor damage.” That was not exactly a lie, depending on the definition of ‘minor’. Valkyrie had been able to fly away from that battle, and the damage had since been repaired. Skippy assured that, because of lessons he learned during that fight, our mighty battlecruiser was now even more powerful than before.
He also warned me that we should not ever get into a fight like that again. I wholeheartedly agreed with him.
“Forty-two,” Fangiu said quietly. He whistled, or maybe that was another type of laugh. “Ah, Colonel Bishop, you have made me very happy! The ‘smart money’ was on the under! Urk!”
“Tell me something. There were wagers on who is flying this ship, and our win total.” It didn’t feel right to talk about war as a sporting event, but that’s how the beetles thought of it. “Was anyone betting on how long we would continue attacking?”
“Yes,” he glanced away. Maybe he figured the subject wasn’t something I wanted to hear. “The Central Wagering Office published odds on how long until the Maxolhx killed or captured you.” He flashed what was supposed to be a smile. “Most of those bets have already expired, and you are still here. Most of the money went toward wagers on when your attacks would stop.”
“When we would give up, you mean?”
“When you would be unable to continue,” he tried not to offend me. “Or, when you decided you had caused enough headaches to the,” my translator stumbled then I heard “kitties.” That made me wonder what nickname the Jeraptha used for the Maxolhx. And what they called us. “Colonel, my people hate the Maxolhx. We were delighted to see that someone was giving them a bloody nose.” As the beetles did not have noses, the translator must have decided that was the best equivalent.
“We have temporarily paused our attacks. But that is a change in strategy.”
“What is your strategy, if I may ask?�
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“It’s,” again I debated how much to tell him. “Evolving.” Then I realized that might be translated as ‘We are making this shit up as we go’. “We are looking for targets of opportunity,” I explained. “Whatever is the best way we can disrupt the enemy’s ability to support extended combat operations.”
“Against Earth, you mean.” The beetle was not stupid. “Our intelligence reports that the Maxolhx have already sent a battlegroup to your homeworld.”
Leaning back in my chair, I indulged in a self-satisfied grin. “Yeah, well. That battlegroup’s return home will be delayed. Like, permanently.”
“Ooooheeeech,” he whistled, a sound like rusty pieces of metal scraping together.
Damn, no way was I ever going to invite a beetle to Karaoke Night. Their singing must be horrible.
He leaned forward on the conference table eagerly. “Is that battlegroup part of the forty-two ships in your count?”
“No.” The fate of that battlegroup, trapped outside the galaxy, was not something Fangiu needed to know. “But we did also destroy the first two ships they sent to Earth, so I think maybe our count is forty-four?”
He shook his head. “For the purpose of wagering, the count begins with the first ghost ship attack, at Koprahdru.” One of his antennas lifted halfway up. “Unless that was not the first ghost ship attack?”
“Ah, for the wager, your oddsmakers are probably limiting the action to Valkyrie. We didn’t have Valkyrie back then. Those first two Maxolhx ships were blown up by the Flying Dutchman.”
Both of his antennas stood straight up. “You attacked two Maxolhx cruisers, with a Thuranin star carrier? How is that possible?”
“It’s a long story, Cadet. Maybe I’ll tell you someday. Ok, so now I have to decide what to do with you.” The sudden expression on his face told me what I said might not have been translated the way I intended. Waving my hands, palms open, I hastened to correct the mistake. “Hey, sorry! All I meant was, which parts of the ship you will have access to. Do you give me your word that you will not interfere with our operations?”
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 46
