Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  Crap.

  It was eating away at me.

  I needed to know.

  To talk in private, I went to my cabin, where I could close the door. “Skippy, I have kind of a delicate matter to discuss with you. No jokes, please, Ok?”

  “Dude. Why so serious?”

  “It’s about Margaret.”

  “Oh. Gotcha. She’s fine, Joe. Right now she is-”

  “I know she’s fine now. My question is about something that happened, uh, back when she was recovering.”

  “She is still recovering.”

  “You know what I mean. Back when alien machines in her head were doing part of the thinking for her. When she didn’t feel like she was herself.”

  “Ok,” there was a cautious tone in his voice. “Go on.”

  “We had kind of a moment, you know? Me and Margaret. She called me ‘Joe’ instead of ‘Sir’ or ‘Colonel’. She said that she was Ok with me leaving her behind for the good of the mission. Hell, she was proud I did that.”

  “What is your question, Joe?”

  “I need to know, was that her talking? She hasn’t called me ‘Joe’ since that day, and-”

  “Uh oh. No can do, sorry.”

  “You can’t do what?”

  “Doctor-patient confidentiality. I can’t talk about her medical condition, now or then. Unless you claim this affects her fitness for duty, which we both know is bullshit.”

  “This affects my fitness for duty!”

  “Um, I think regulations state you need to discuss that with Simms,” he suggested.

  “Screw regulations.”

  “Nope. You can’t play that game with me. I made a promise to Margaret that I would not divulge any details about her condition, to anyone. Dude, you should have asked me back before you surrendered the power of attorney she gave you.”

  “You can’t even give me a freakin’ hint?”

  “Here’s a hint: ask her.”

  “No way. She doesn’t seem to want to talk about it. I’m not a hundred percent certain she even remembers it. The last thing she needs right now is me dumping my emotional baggage on her. Not now. After the rescue, maybe. No, that’s not right. After we get the wormhole open near Earth. No, crap, then we’ll be at Earth and they’ll pull her off the ship for debriefing. They’ll pull me off the ship and throw me in prison.”

  “Dude, your life consists of jumping from the frying pan into the fire.”

  “I know it. This sucks.” Looking around my cabin, I sought something I could smash. What I decided was that destroying some object would only be a form of self-destructiveness. “Thank you.”

  “Hmm. Is this some weird empathy thing? You’re thanking me for listening to you?”

  “No. I’m thanking you for keeping your promise to Margaret.”

  “Oh. No problem. I do care about her, Joe.”

  “Me too, Skippy. Me too.”

  Club Skippy was actually a pretty nice place. It was a rather ordinary world, with the benefits of being isolated, and humans could breathe the air and didn’t need to wear special protective gear. There were mountains and rivers and trees and wide-open grasslands, and the local predators weren’t anything to worry about. We identified two areas that had similar terrain as the islands where the prisoners were being held on Rikers, and set up mock structures based on Skippy’s best intel about those camps. That intel might be out of date, and the STAR team knew they had to be flexible.

  In addition to practicing the rescue, we used Club Skippy to sharpen our overall fitness. Running on a treadmill is just not the same as running over broken ground and up and down hills. We did a lot of that and by ‘we’, I mean I ran with the STARs and participated in as much of their training as I could.

  The Paradise people actually had an advantage over us, because they had recently been training on a Ruhar world with gravity nine percent heavier than Earth normal. We usually kept artificial gravity aboard both ships at one Gee. That was heavier than the Dutchman was designed for, and lighter than the previous setting aboard Valkyrie. Yes, I know that ‘heavy’ and ‘light’ are not the technically correct terms, those describe what gravity does to objects that have mass. Heavy and light are how normal people think about it, so that’s how I’m describing it.

  The gravity aboard Valkyrie was actually variable in sections of the ship, especially in the areas the STAR team used for training. They exercised and practiced maneuvers in gravity that was anywhere from sixty percent below to twenty two percent above Earth normal. Training at different levels of gravity had multiple purposes. To accurately replicate conditions the STARs might encounter on a mission away from the ship. To assist in conditioning, and if you haven’t tried to run in gravity twenty percent heavier than you’re used to, believe me it is a tough workout. Finally and maybe most importantly, it forced people to relearn their eye-hand and eye-foot coordination.

  In the STAR team training area aboard our mighty battlecruiser was a bulkhead lined with basketball hoops. They weren’t used for pickup games, Smythe was too concerned about his people getting injured to allow unstructured sports. No, the hoops were there to show people what happened when the force of gravity changed. Pick up a basketball that feels heavier than normal. No problem, right? You just put more force into your throw. No, it doesn’t work that way. When you throw, your brain is subconsciously calculating where to aim, based on how the ball would fly in Earth-normal gravity. In a different gravity field, the arc the ball follows is different, either higher or flatter than you’re used to. A grenade tossed in anything other than a standard one Gee also won’t fly the way you expect. Bullets also follow a ballistic arc, unless they are powered rounds. Anyway, your body, deep down to your muscle memory, needs to relearn how to throw things, how your feet rise and fall, how to run and jump and shoot, depending on the effect of local gravity. Before a STAR team leaves the ship, they hold a weight that is the same mass as a standard grenade, memorizing how that mass feels in their hands. Sure, mech suits and rifle sights automatically compensate for differing levels of gravity, but our best weapon is a well-trained person. Without the person, the weapons are useless.

  I said the Paradise people had an advantage over us, because they had been training, living, resting and sleeping in higher gravity for more than four months. The planet where we practiced for and revised our plans for the rescue, had gravity only two percent greater than what we experienced aboard our ships. We barely noticed the extra two percent, or that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Where we noticed was while running together. The Paradise people ran just a bit more easily, reached the top of hills faster, and were less out of breath than we were. Of course, no one cared if someone else was a bit-

  No. That is total bullshit. Special operators hate being second at anything. Kapoor urged our people on, exhorting them until he, too, was gasping for breath. Smythe could have run faster than anyone on his bionic legs. He didn’t. He ran back and forth, speeding up to catch the Paradise team, dropping back to match our slower pace.

  The Commandos did not miss a chance to rub it in, pausing at the top of hills to drink from their water bottles while they waited for us. That seriously annoyed me. No, it pissed me off. Part of what pissed me off was seeing Gunnery Sergeant Lamar freakin’ Greene charging up hills faster than I could run. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t even especially look at me, and that really pissed me off. It was like he didn’t consider me to be competition and-

  Ok, I am not being fair to the guy. If he and Adams had resumed their relationship, or hooked up or whatever, I didn’t know about it, because it wasn’t any of my business. Greene was stationed aboard Valkyrie and Adams was assigned to the Dutchman. Maybe, as part of the daily status report, I might have checked on who flew between ships for R&R, and didn’t see either of their names. Adams was busy refreshing her skills in the Dutchman’s CIC, and Greene had a lot of catching up to do with learning how to use our equipment and adjusting to our tactics. They simply
didn’t have time for personal relationships, and that wasn’t anything I did.

  That didn’t mean I couldn’t be happy about it, though as the commander I should not have been happy about it.

  Hey, I never claimed to be perfect.

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  Our third morning on Club Skippy, I was running with the STARs and I was proud to say that I wasn’t bringing up the rear. On the run up our last hill that morning, the Commandos surged ahead as usual, leaving us dragging behind. I strode to the front of our column, pumping my arms and keeping my chin up. Right behind me, the STARs probably thought I was pushing it too hard, too early. Frey matched my pace, striding beside me and whispering through gasps. “Sir. You’re. Gonna. Crash and burn.”

  “I’m. Ok,” was all I could manage, while increasing my pace. She dropped behind slightly, while ahead, the Paradise team had already stopped at the top, standing or jogging in place as they waited. The last thirty meters, I eased up, sucking in great breaths as the STARs drew even with me. My goal had not been to race to the top, what I wanted was to not be too out of breath when I got there.

  As the Paradise team began turning to run down the hill, smirking at us with their smirky little smirk faces, I shouted “Hey! If you guys got into shape, you wouldn’t need to stop all the time.”

  They didn’t know how to respond to that, standing there with their mouths open, sputtering words we couldn’t hear. We raced right past them, blocking the narrow route down the other side of the hill. By unspoken consent, that descent turned into a race, down the hill, splashing across a stream and an all-out sprint across a field back to our camp. To my delight, the group was mixed as we crossed the imaginary finish line, and there was much genuinely good-natured trash talk and back-slapping as we recovered. Smythe winked at me, and over the course of the day, all the STARs gave me silent thumbs ups, or fist-pump gestures. The best comment I got was from Frey. “I thought you were crazy, eh?” She said. “You are, but in a good way, Sir.”

  The old man, who wasn’t old, still had it.

  I also had a twisted ankle from stumbling over a rock, but Doctor Skippy’s Patented Magical Nanobots fixed me right up. Even if the nanobots working inside my leg made me go temporarily numb in, let’s just say, an adjacent area.

  Of course, Doctor Skippy hadn’t warned me about that side effect.

  In my tent that afternoon, Skippy was explaining the basics of his infiltration plan for the rescue operation on Rikers. I was only sort of half-listening.

  “-the dropships will need to be careful of their heat signatures once they descend over water. Without-”

  “Wait.” I jerked my head up. “Why is heat a problem?”

  “Ugh. Were you not listening to me at all?”

  “Obviously I was listening, I heard you say something about heat signatures. Duh,” I added to cover up the fact that I had not been listening.

  “Oh for- what is the question? Do you not understand-”

  “I do understand about infrared signatures. Why is it a problem? Both of the islands where prisoners are being held are in the tropical zone.” One of the islands was in the planet’s northern hemisphere, the other south of the equator. For simplicity, we referred to the islands as Objective Dixie and Objective Yankee. Both islands were not merely dots in the vast ocean, they were each about the size of Hispaniola, the Caribbean island that was home to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. According to Skippy, the islands had been chosen by the White Wind clan because they were far from the mainland where almost all the lizards lived, plus the islands had enough land and rainfall to support humans growing almost all of their food. Separating the prisoners between two islands was a way to ensure the entire population was not lost, if disease spread among one group.

  “We will be descending over water, to avoid detection,” he explained patiently. “The ships going to Objective Yankee will be flying over warm water all the way, so heat signatures are not a problem. But the ships going to Dixie will be approaching from the direction of Riker’s south pole, where the water is cold this time of year. Let me explain this to you, Joe. It will blow your little monkey mind.” A line appeared on the floor. “Imagine this is the planet’s equator. On this side,” Skippy was suddenly wearing shorts, a Hawaiian shirt and a straw hat. Plus, he was holding, was that a margarita? “It is summer.” He stepped across the line and he was then dressed in a parka and he was standing on a snowboard. “On this side, it is winter. SUH-mer,” he was on the summer side. “WIN-ter,” he jumped back to his snowboard outfit. If that wasn’t annoying enough, he began hopping rapidly across the line, chanting “Summer, winter, summer, winter, summer, winter-”

  “Ok, I get it!” I waved my hands in surrender.

  “It’s kind of cool, when you think about it,” he beamed with happiness in his Hawaiian shirt.

  “No, it’s cool to never think about it. I am sorry I asked. Hey, it’s winter in the southern hemisphere, so is it chilly at Objective Dixie?”

  “No! Ugh. I covered that in the briefing this morning. You were not listening.”

  No way could I argue my way out of that. “You’re right, I was distracted.” Closing my laptop, I turned my chair toward him. “You have my complete attention. Please, start over.”

  “Hmmph.”

  “Please. You can give me a pop quiz at the end, to test if I was listening.”

  “If you fail, will you watch Season One of ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’?”

  Shit. There was more than one season of that show? I panicked. “How about I watch one episode? And you can pick the crappiest episode of all seasons.”

  “Deal!”

  He cheated. The pop quiz was about obscure facts he vaguely mentioned, but were included in the footnotes of the briefing I was supposed to read. I was reading it, but the damned thing was eight hundred pages! Also, the assault team really did not need to know nerdy trivia about how often the planet’s magnetic field had flipped in the ancient past.

  Anyway, I failed the quiz, so I was forced to watch an episode of what fans call ‘SMDM’, pronounced Ess Emm Dee Emm. Again, Skippy cheated. Instead of having to suffer through one TV episode, which would be about forty-two minutes long, he dredged up a made-for-TV-movie called ‘Bionic Ever After’. Mercifully, this ninety-six minute crapfest was so bad, it killed the franchise. So, we have to be thankful for that. Since I had not seen any previous episodes, I was totally lost in the plot.

  You know how, when you are waiting for a file to download so you can do some super-important thing, you kill some time on social media? You click on one link, that leads to another, then another, and soon you realize the file download timed out, and anyway the project was due three hours ago. Anyway, after watching the bionic movie, I got curious about who was responsible for that crime against humanity. Ok, so I skimmed through an episode. Then another.

  You question whether those shows were as bad as I say?

  I have two words for you. Actually, the show shortened it to one word: fembot.

  Google it.

  Go ahead, I can wait.

  See?

  Fembots.

  Because I do not hate you, I will not summarize the plot of ‘Bionic Ever After’.

  Hey, you in the back.

  Yeah, you know who I’m talking about. You. I do hate you, and you know why. Don’t argue with me, we both know I’m right. You are banished, until you watch every minute of that crappy 70s TV show, plus the ‘Bionic Woman’ spinoff.

  Skippy will be giving you a pop quiz, so you’d better take notes.

  “Heeeeey, Joe,” Skippy announced over my zPhone earpiece. “I have news for you.” His avatar was floating above my cot. The accommodations at Club Skippy were not exactly the five star resort promised in the glossy brochure he had printed, and Skippy had backpedaled on his promises of a luxury experience. After we landed, he changed marketing strategy, boasting that it was an ‘Eco resort’. That explained why we were sleeping in tents and coo
king food over wood fires. Actually, everyone enjoyed the change of pace from the sterile environment aboard the ships.

  “Hey. I appreciate the fancy towel animal you left on my cot yesterday. That was a very nice feature of Club Skippy.”

  “Um, what?”

  “You know,” I teased him. “The towel was all twisted into, uh, something. Was that an octopus? Or some sort of snake?”

  “Dude, I have no idea what you’re talking about. You hung the towel from the hoop holding up your tent, after you took a bath in the river. It must have fallen onto your cot.”

  “Huh. I guess that explains why it was wet. So, what’s up? How can you have news? We’re in the middle of nowhere.”

  “True. I guess it is not technically news, but there is no expression for ‘olds’ so you know what I mean. Anyway, I was bored, so I dug deeper into the data we pulled from that relay station we pinged before we took the wormhole shortcut to get here. When I say ‘deeper, I mean way down to the bottom of the barrel. It appears that the Kristang have gotten more serious about information security. Either the civil war has motivated them, or some of them suddenly woke up to the risks.”

  I stared at him. “Better InfoSec? Like tougher encryption? That wouldn’t matter to you, right? Your awesomeness can crack any code.”

  “Pretty much, yes, although there is a difference between encryption and codes, that I will not waste my time trying to explain to you. The problem is, this is actually quite clever of the lizards, who’d have thunk it, huh? They used one of their more sophisticated encryption schemes to secure a series of video files. When I reviewed the files, I saw they were boring stuff about clan politics, plans for attacks in their civil war, blah, blah, blah. Nothing I or any of us care about. But, because I am so bored while you monkeys play games down there, I recently took another look at the videos. My intent was to alter them, maybe cause some mischief. While taking the video apart, I discovered a second, much higher-level encryption embedded in the files! The lizards must have purchased that encryption from a species like the Bosphuraq. I cracked it, of course, no problem there. Those sneaky damned lizards must have anticipated someone would read their files, so they made the content so dull, no one would look deeper. They fooled me, Joe. I’m sorry. This is embarrassing. I learned an important lesson for sure.”