That made him pause, as he listened to the translation. The light green of blushing returned to the shell covering his head. “Your homeworld is not a nice place?” He asked. Even through the translator, I could hear the embarrassment he felt for me.
“No. I mean, yes. It is a very nice place. We have beaches, and-” What do the Jeraptha think is a good spot for a vacation. “Mountains, and, uh, forests. Hey!” Sudden inspiration struck me. “We have casinos! Gambling halls,” I added. “Las Vegas, Monaco, Hong Kong,” that short list exhausted my knowledge of gambling hot spots. Though I was not an expert, I didn’t think the Indian casinos in Connecticut would lure the Jeraptha across thousands of lightyears.
But, like I said, I’m not a gambler.
“Casinos?” He asked with a lot less enthusiasm than I expected. “That is where you play games of chance?”
“That, and there are games of skill, like, uh, poker?” My lack of knowledge was obvious. Poker required some skill, but, if you got dealt a crappy hand the guy across the table had four aces, you were kind of screwed.
“I am familiar with the game you call, ‘Black Jack’,” he pronounced it as two words. “Those are not interesting to us, because the odds are stacked in favor of the house and cannot be changed. There is no real action in such games.”
“Well, unless you cheat the house by counting cards or something like that.” I saw that in an old movie. Later, I was bitterly disappointed to learn that counting cards only gave the cheaters an advantage of a few percentage points. “Uh, if not for casinos, why are you so eager to get to Earth?”
“To gain an advantage, of course. My people are working with outdated information. There have been several seasons of sports on your planet, since access was cut off when the wormhole shut down,” he tilted his head at me. If he was expecting or hoping for a more detailed explanation of how humans had manipulated an Elder wormhole, I was going to disappoint him. Sure, soon enough he was going to learn the truth one way or another, but I wasn’t going to volunteer to blow the secret we had worked so hard to keep.
“Ah, don’t get your hopes up, Cadet. Many sports had their seasons suspended or canceled when the Kristang were taking over. And the global economy took a big hit, so some teams or entire leagues folded.”
“I am sorry, what is ‘folded’? The translation is unclear.” He blushed again. “I am sorry, my people do not have much experience with human languages. Until recently, we did not think it was,” he looked away, “important. I do not mean any offense.”
“It’s all good,” I responded, which was stupid. Slang expressions were especially difficult to translate. “We did not take offense. ‘Folded’ means the team has ceased operating.” Seeing a look on his face that I guessed was either crestfallen or shock, I added “Many teams are still operating, and you’re right. The information your people have is outdated. Why would getting that data give you an advantage?”
“Because I would be able to gain insight into the games, before others of my people. It is my hope that I could better handicap my wagers.”
“Oh, you want to win money?”
“Please,” he maybe looked anguished? “With my people, the money is less important than the action. You understand?”
“Yeah, I think I do.” One of my uncles was an enthusiastic gambler. He drove down to ‘The Indians’ in Connecticut twice a month, and flew out to Vegas at least once a year. The reason he still had a roof over his head is because his wife kept him on a strict budget for gambling. I guess she figured he could otherwise be blowing his money on something really stupid, like an expensive boat to catch a five-dollar fish.
My uncle always bragged about how casinos comped his room, and how much money he won. Of course, gamblers winning money is how casinos stay in business. Not. Anyway, listening to him at family dinners and cookouts, I sort of understood the allure of gambling culture. Maybe the Jeraptha weren’t too different? “All the info you need is aboard this ship. Uh, the info is current as of when we left Earth.”
“You would give me access to the data?”
“Give?” I pretended to be shocked. Slapping the table loudly, I got the attention of other people in the galley. “Simms, can you believe this guy? We got a treasure trove of hot inside info, and he thinks we’re just gonna give it to him?”
She caught on right away. Damn, I have a great executive officer. “I don’t think so.”
“Oh,” Cadet-Undercandidate Fangiu’s antennas were twitching, agitated. “Certainly, I would cut you in for a share. Of course.”
“That’s more like it,” I forgot about not using slang. “How big a cut?”
“Eighty-twenty?”
“Ha,” I laughed. “Twenty percent? Simms, can you believe this mook?”
“I think he can forgettaboutit,” she scowled with a twinkle in her eyes.
Whatever ‘mook’ translated to in the Jeraptha language, it got my message across. “Apologies. Fifty-fifty?” His antennas laid out to the side. “You can’t blame a guy for trying, right?”
The day before we arrived at Rikers, I was reviewing an important virtual reality simulation in my office, when Skippy interrupted me.
“Joe!”
“Ah!” I jerked upright, startled, and pulled off the VR headset I was wearing. “Damn it, is this important? Hold on, let me pause the game before I get my whole squad killed.” I had been playing the latest Call of Duty game and for once, the game was going well for me. Ok, it was not the newest version of that game, but we had been away from Earth so long, I had missed a lot of releases.
As a bonus, I also missed a lot of glitches that were corrected by the time I picked up the game.
“Too late for that anyway, you shouldn’t have crossed that last bridge,” Skippy sniffed disgustedly. “There is an enemy tank inside that building across the town square.”
“A freakin’ tank? That’s bullshit. How can a tank get inside a-”
“The back wall of the building was blown out by that artillery strike you called in. By the way, the target you hit there was a decoy, dumdum. Man, even in a game, you always fail to consider the consequences.”
“Ah, screw it,” I tossed the headset on the desk. “What is it?”
“You have been neglecting your paperwork, again.” He added an extra note of disdain by pronouncing the word as ‘Uh-GAIN’ instead of ‘Uh-ginn’ like normal people do.
“We don’t have a single scrap of paper aboard the Valkyrie, Skippy.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Is this because I don’t read the status report every morning? That report is, like, fifty pages long! I wouldn’t understand half of it anyway.”
“True, and that is why I summarize the important items on the first three pages.”
That was true. Not only were the critical items listed first, the beginning of the status report was usually presented in comic book form, which made it easier to read. By the way, if you ever wondered who would win a fight between Batman and Donald Duck, Skippy answered that question in the classic Issue #357 of the daily status report. “Yeah, I do read that,” I admitted. After being insulted that he was showing me a comic book, I got over it. “What’s the problem now?”
“You have still not completed the paperwork for your official promotion to colonel. I filled it in as best I could before we left Earth, but-”
“Oh for- Like that matters now? We can’t get to Earth right now. If we ever do get there, the whole planet might soon be a radioactive cinder.”
“Joe, your personnel file lists ‘problem with authority’ and ‘lack of attention to detail’, among many other bad things. Assuming we do get back to Earth and it is still intact, because otherwise what the hell are we trying to accomplish out here, wouldn’t it be nice if you at least had your personnel records updated? That would be one less thing for the Army to complain about. Especially as, you know, any return to Earth would include you telling UNEF that all the happy stuff you told them abou
t your homeworld being safe was bullshit, and a massive fleet of Maxolhx warships will inevitably be there soon. Because once again, you failed to account for the Law of Unintended Consequences.”
“Ok, I get your point. Uh, give me the file,” I pulled a laptop out of a drawer.
“No need for that, Joe. Also, I know you’ll find a reason to procrastinate and never do it. I will read the questions right now, and you tell me what to list in the file.”
“Oh, cool. Go ahead.”
“The first unanswered question is your preferred personal pronoun.”
For a second, I froze, just blinking slowly at him. “Uh, what again?”
“Your, preferred, personal, pronoun.” He said very slowly. “Ugh. Like, do you prefer to be called ‘he/him’ or ‘she/her’ or ‘they/them’ or something else.”
“This is on an official Army form?” I was sure he was screwing with me.
“Yes, dumdum. The Army has been changing with the times. Try to keep up, huh?”
“For real? Uh, well, I prefer to be referred to as ‘Valroth the Destroyer, Devourer of Worlds’.”
That made him chuckle. “Nope, that’s too long for the form.”
“How about just ‘Val’ for short?”
“Joe, you need to take this seriously.”
“Ok. Can you input ‘Duuuuuude’?”
“Let me try- Huh. It worked.”
“Are the rest of the questions like that?”
“No. Some of them are really stupid,” he admitted.
My day kind of went downhill from there.
On the way to Rikers, we had one last issue to settle before launching the rescue operation. What was our cover story? There were a hundred suggestions, in the end I decided on the simplest answer. The good news was, that cover story did not require us to avoid leaving any human DNA behind, and it explained why we were taking a big risk to pull a small group of lowly humans off an unimportant world. The cover story was that our raiding force was a UNEF group attached to the Alien Legion, a group who had either been given the OK by the Ruhar for the op, or went rogue to rescue their own people. The Mavericks had done enough unauthorized stuff that no one would be surprised a group of humans would go off doing whatever they thought was right. Sure, Ruhar military leadership would know they had not approved a rescue, but even they would wonder if their rather shady military intelligence division had cooked up an operation that had plausible deniability. This was a case where the duplicity of our enemies and supposed allies worked for us.
With the cover story settled, I had to emphasize the vital need to conceal the true nature of our force. Smythe also took pains to pound the need for secrecy into the heads of the Commando team. We did the best we could, and had to trust the professionalism of the people from Paradise, people we did not know well yet. My concern was not that any of them would deliberately blow the cover story that the raid was an Alien Legion op, I was worried that one of them might say or do something that could make the lizards or their patrons suspicious about the cover story. The Commandos that not lived for years with the need for secrecy, it wasn’t second nature for them.
It was not an optimal situation, and we also didn’t have a choice.
We jumped inside the Rahkarsh Diweln star system and listened with passive sensors, while probes we shot out by railguns raced inward toward the target planet. Inside the probes were microwormholes that would provide a real-time communications link between the planet, the Flying Dutchman, and Valkyrie. To avoid any possibility of the Maxolhx connecting the ghost ship with humans if the operation were blown, we would be going in with Kristang dropships, with the Dutchman doing the pickup on the outbound leg. Valkyrie would be loitering far from the planet, remaining out of sight. Simms had orders not to take our mighty battlecruiser into a fight unless there was an extreme emergency. In our pre-mission briefing, I had stressed to her that we could afford to lose the kidnapped people on Rikers, the entire STAR team and all our dropships including mine. We could even afford to lose our trusty old Flying Dutchman, but we could not risk exposing the fearsome ghost ship. Simms wasn’t happy about her orders, and neither was I.
To save time, because we were on the clock before one or another group of lizards jumped in to steal the poor people we wanted to rescue, we launched our dropships before getting a full set of data from the probes. We could always turn the dropships around, or have them coast stealthily past the planet to be retrieved on the other side. We could not get a do-over if a hateful group of lizards arrived early to mess everything up for us.
Despite having to cut training short, and lacking up-to-date intel on the target, I was feeling pretty good about the op. And, right on cue, Skippy harshed my buzz. “Uh oh, Joe,” he muttered as we flew alone in a Dragon-A. He was with me because his particular set of skills might be needed near the planet. I was flying a Kristang spacecraft because if we were exposed, we did not want the enemy to see a more sophisticated ship. The Dragon-A was the smaller of the two models, and we needed the larger ones for the evac. It bugged me that we had plenty of Maxolhx Panthers, but we couldn’t risk using them. So, the op would be conducted in old Dragons we pulled from the Ice-Cold Dagger to the Heart, after we had captured that ship full of lizard-sicles.
Yuck, that had to be the worst popsicle flavor ever.
“Oh, crap. What is the problem now?” There wasn’t anything that stood out as immediately alarming in the sensor data, I knew that because I was totaling focused on reviewing the data feed from the Flying Dutchman. We had launched with all the velocity needed to reach the planet, the Dragon’s engines would be needed only to slow down when we approached the atmosphere, so I didn’t have much to do in terms of flying. Whatever he thought was a problem, it wasn’t anything big enough for my slow brain to recognize. There was not a fleet of Thuranin ships in orbit, nor were there ships from a rival clan attempting to steal the humans. There were not any ships in orbit at all, and the planet was too thinly populated to have a space station. We knew from Skippy’s intel that Rikers had two dozen Strategic Defense satellites equipped with maser cannons and missiles, plus up to eighty small sensor satellites. The exact number depended on how many of the SD platforms were actually functional, Skippy couldn’t get that info until we were closer to the planet.
The planet appeared to be peaceful, the only live weapons fire was at a training range we knew about, and that was over three thousand kilometers from the closest camp where humans were being held. Overall, the place was as sleepy and poverty-stricken as Skippy told us to expect. Two population centers were large enough to be called cities, although based on the current population they were really just large towns. There used to be more lizards on Rikers, back when the White Wind clan was relatively prosperous. By the time we got there, much of the artificial structures like buildings, bridges, roads, water systems and all the other mechanical stuff that supported civilization were getting shoddy. The lizards who still lived there couldn’t afford, or didn’t care to, maintain all that expensive infrastructure. Many of the buildings were abandoned, and whole villages and towns were empty. Clan leaders liked to concentrate their populations, to make it easier to control the common people, and everyday clan social life encouraged lizards to live in large, extended families.
“The problem,” Skippy told me as he fed data to the cockpit’s main display, “is that the tactical situation on the ground has changed. As I warned you might happen, the Fire Dragons have increased security around the prisoners. The Objective Dixie camp now has a contingent of six guards on that island. All the humans from the Objective Yankee camp are currently in transport aircraft, being moved to an abandoned village on the mainland, near an old military base. The humans in the southern camp will also be moved to that village, when secure transport is available.”
“Damn it! We might as well take all of our planning and training and throw it out the freakin’ window! Let Smythe know.”
“I am talking to him right now, also wit
h Major Kapoor and Commandant Fabron. They used somewhat more colorful language to express their feelings.”
“I will try to be more entertaining to you in the future. What the hell happened? The lizards down there heard that other clans are planning to raid the camps?”
“No, Joe. I will know more when the probes get closer, but the message traffic I’ve intercepted indicates this is purely a precautionary move. Basically, the clan leaders down there said ‘Hey, we are hateful deceitful lizards. What would we do if another clan had something valuable to our patrons’?”
“Shit. Because they are assholes, they assume everyone is an asshole?”
“Joe, pretty much the entire Kristang warrior class leadership are assholes. The ones who are not assholes get selected out by, um,” he giggled. “By process of assassination,” he snickered at the pun he invented.
“Ok, Ok. So, the lizards here anticipate some other clan might be tempted to conduct a raid. Let me think a minute.” Smythe, Kapoor and Fabron were undoubtedly doing their own thinking about who, and if, we could salvage the operation. “Skippy, why didn’t the lizards just jam all the humans from each camp into a transport aircraft, and fly them out in one sortie?”
“Those camps are deliberately isolated, the lizards set them up far from populated areas. It takes long-range aircraft to fly that far and back. The simple truth is, they only have four flightworthy aircraft with the range to reach the camps, and those transports can each fit only thirty passengers. Um, the definition of ‘flightworthy’ is based on lizard standards. I certainly would not want to be in one of those things. You know how casual the lizards are about maintaining their equipment.”
Zooming in the display, I followed a pair of symbols slowly advancing across a vast expanse of ocean. There was another pair ahead on the flight path, closer to the mainland. “These four are the aircraft carrying the human prisoners?”
Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9) Page 50
