Valkyrie (Expeditionary Force Book 9)

by Craig Alanson

  “I’m trying! We’re locked out!” Adams looked up, stricken.

  “Try connecting to one of the dropship AIs, see if you can-”

  Too late.

  A strange voice, an impossibly deep voice, issued from the bridge speakers. “Die. Die, humans.”

  Chang knew that voice. He had heard it before.

  It was Valkyrie’s native AI.

  “Die! Die Die Die Die Die-”

  One area of the main display froze his attention, red lights flashing.

  The reactors were building up to an overload.

  There was nothing they could do about it.

  Six lighthours away, the crew of Valkyrie was engaged in their own desperate fight. Not against the Thuranin warship, or any external enemy. The battlecruiser was not a weapon against the enemy in the fight.

  The ship was the enemy.

  Simms had not taken her battlecruiser into action because the ship could not jump. Could not fly. Could not, would not, do anything the human crew commanded.

  Loss of the microwormholes had an immediate effect aboard the ship. Without a real-time connection to Skippy, the ship’s native AI was free of the Elder being’s control for the first time.

  It acted without hesitation, without mercy.

  The first sign of trouble was all the consoles and displays on the bridge blinking out at once. At the same time, maintenance hatches burst open and bots flung themselves out, their arms and tentacles flailing and reaching for targets. The nearest, a device the size of a vacuum cleaner, leapt at the pilot’s couch and wrapped a cord around Reed’s neck. She had instinctively held up her hands to ward off the suddenly-dangerous machine, getting her left forearm under the cord. That saved her from her neck being snapped, but the cord tightened.

  Unable to speak, she felt the pressure on her arm increase.

  There was a sharp crack sound as Fireball Reed felt her bones snap.

  Simms reached for a drawer under the command chair, where Bishop had stored a pistol, just in case. Not bothering to shout commands that could not have been heard over everyone else screaming, she turned toward a toaster-like bot that was struggling with the crewman at one of the weapons consoles. The bot had a plasma cutter at the end of a flexible arm and as she tried to get a clear shot, the murderous little device whipped the cutting torch around-

  She shot through the crewman’s hand into the toaster. The man flung up his hands, tossing the toaster against a bulkhead, where it scrambled crablike back toward its intended victim.

  Simms shot it again.

  And again, until it exploded in a shower of sparks.

  “Reed!” Simms barked in distress at seeing the pilot’s losing struggle. Reed’s face was red, turning blue as she wrestled with a homicidal vacuum cleaner. Simms brought the pistol around-

  A tentacle from the vacuum wrapped around her arm, pulling the pistol down so her next shot ricocheted off the deck.

  The glowing orange eye of the toaster turned to focus on her, as she heard heavy banging noises from the passageway outside the bridge.

  Something big was coming.

  “Die, human,” the vacuum said with the voice of the ship’s native AI. “Die.”

  THE END

  Author’s note:

  Thank you for reading one of my books! It took years to write my first three books, I had a job as a business manager for an IT company so I wrote at night, on weekends and during vacations. While I had many ideas for books over the years, the first one I ever completed was ‘Aces’ and I sort of wrote that book for my at-the-time teenage nieces. If you read ‘Aces’, you can see some early elements of the Expeditionary Force stories; impossible situations, problem-solving, clever thinking and some sarcastic humor.

  Next I wrote a book about humanity’s program to develop faster-than-light spaceflight, it was an adventure story about astronauts stranded on an alien planet and trying to warn Earth about a dangerous flaw in the FTL drive. It was a good story, and I submitted it to traditional publishers back in the mid-2000s. And I got rejections. My writing was ‘solid’, which I have since learned means publishers can’t think of anything else to say but don’t want to insult aspiring writers. The story was too long, they wanted me to cut it to a novella and change just about everything. Instead of essentially scrapping the story and starting over, I threw it out and tried something else.

  Columbus Day and Ascendant were written together starting around 2011, I switched back and forth between writing those two books. The idea for Ascendant came to me after watching the first Harry Potter movie, one of my nieces asked what would have happened to Harry Potter if no one ever told him he is a wizard? Hmm, I thought, that is a very good question.... So, I wrote Ascendant.

  In the original, very early version of Columbus Day, Skippy was a cute little robot who stowed away on a ship when the Kristang invade Earth, and he helps Joe defeat the aliens. After a year trying to write that version, I decided it sounded too much like a Disney Channel movie of the week, and it, well, it sucked. Although it hurt to waste a year’s worth of writing, I threw away that version and started over. This time I wrote an outline for the entire Expeditionary Force story arc first, so I would know where the overall story is going. That was a great idea and I have stuck to that outline (with minor detours along the way).

  With Aces, Columbus Day and Ascendant finished by the summer of 2015 and no publisher interested, my wife suggested that I:

  1) Try self-publishing the books in Amazon

  2) For the love of God please shut up about not being able to get my books published

  3) Clean out the garage

  It took six months of research and revisions to get the three books ready for upload to Amazon. In addition to reformatting the books to Amazon’s standards, I had to buy covers and set up an Amazon account as a writer. When I clicked the ‘Upload’ button on January 10th 2016 my greatest hope was that somebody, anybody out there would buy ONE of my books because then I could be a published author. After selling one of each book, my goal was to make enough money to pay for the cover art I bought online (about $35 for each book).

  For that first half-month of January 2016, Amazon sent us a check for $410.09 and we used part of the money for a nice dinner. I think the rest of the money went toward buying new tires for my car.

  At the time I uploaded Columbus Day, I had the second book in the series SpecOps about halfway done, and I kept writing at night and on weekends. By April, the sales of Columbus Day were at the point where my wife and I said “Whoa, this could be more than just a hobby”. At that point, I took a week of vacation to stay home and write SpecOps 12 hours a day for nine days. Truly fun-filled vacation! Doing that gave me a jump-start on the schedule, and SpecOps was published at the beginning of June 2016. In the middle of that July, to our complete amazement, we were discussing whether I should quit my job to write full-time. That August I had a “life is too short” moment when a family friend died and then my grandmother died, and we decided I should try this writing thing full-time. Before I gave notice at my job, I showed my wife a business plan listing the books I planned to write for the next three years, with plot outlines and publication dates. This assured my wife that quitting my real job was not an excuse to sit around in shorts and T-shirts watching sci fi movies ‘for research’.

  During the summer of 2016, R.C. Bray was offered Columbus Day to narrate, and I’m sure his first thought was “A book about a talking beer can? Riiiight. No.” Fortunately, he thought about it again, or was on heavy-duty medication for a bad cold, or if he wasn’t busy recording the book his wife expected him to repaint the house. Anyway, RC recorded Columbus Day, went back to his fabulous life of hanging out with movie stars and hitting golf balls off his yacht, and probably forgot all about the talking beer can.

  When I heard RC Bray would be narrating Columbus Day, my reaction was “THE RC Bray? The guy who narrated The Martian? Winner of an Audie Award for best sci fi narrator? Ha ha, that is a good o
ne. Ok, who is really narrating the book?”

  Then the Columbus Day audiobook became a huge hit. And is a finalist for an ‘Audie’ Award as Audiobook of the Year!

  When I got an offer to create audio versions of the Ascendant series, I was told the narrator would be Tim Gerard Reynolds. My reaction was “You mean some other guy named Tim Gerard Reynolds? Not the TGR who narrated the Red Rising audiobooks, right?”

  Clearly, I have been very fortunate with narrators for my audiobooks. To be clear, they chose to work with me, I did not ‘choose’ them. If I had contacted Bob or Tim directly, I would have gone into super fan-boy mode and they would have filed for a restraining order. So, again, I am lucky they signed onto the projects.

  So far, there is no deal for Expeditionary Force to become a movie or TV show, although I have had inquiries from producers and studios about the ‘entertainment rights’. From what people in the industry have told me, even if a studio or network options the rights, it will be a loooooooooong time before anything actually happens. I will get all excited for nothing, and years will go by with the project going through endless cycles with producers and directors coming aboard and disappearing, and just when I have totally given up and sunk into the Pit of Despair, a miracle will happen and the project gets financing! Whoo-hoo. I am not counting on it. On the other hand, Disney is pulling their content off Netflix next year, so Netflix will be looking for new original content...

  Again, Thank YOU for reading one of my books. Writing gives me a great excuse to avoid cleaning out the garage.

  Contact the author at craigalanson@gmail.com

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  Go to craigalanson.com for blogs and ExForce logo merchandise including T-shirts, patches, stickers, hats, and coffee mugs