Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “Well, shit,” I slumped back in my chair.

  Smythe was not so easily deterred. “Skippy, given the history of the Maxolhx mothballing facilities they hope to use later, would they have prepared their equipment for long-term storage?”

  “Yes,” the beer can mumbled.

  That cheered me right up. “Aha. So there is no reason to think the gear they left behind is in poor condition?”

  “Crap,” Skippy moaned. “When this crazy plan fails, you are going to blame me.”

  Because we still had no idea how to break into the pixie factory, and because Smythe wanted his team to tackle a softer target before we raided the Maxolhx, we proceeded to the star system where Skippy thought the Maxolhx had abandoned a facility on a moon, including dropships. The moonbase was surrounded by sensitive, overlapping sensor fields that Skippy grudgingly admitted were very sophisticated for the Bosphuraq’s level of technology, he suspected they had stolen the sensor gear from the Maxolhx. Just getting Smythe’s team down to the moon’s surface was a major obstacle.

  “This is the tricky part,” Reed whispered as her Falcon detected the faint, outermost line of the overlapping sensor fields that surrounded the planet, the moon and the two orbiting battlestations.

  “Yes, it is,” the voice of Skippy agreed softly from the speaker on the console between the two pilot seats. “Why are we whispering?”

  “It seems appropriate,” Reed kept her voice low.

  “It is entirely unnecessary, I assure you. In space, no one can hear you kvetching.”

  “I was not-” She decided that arguing with a beer can would not accomplish anything.

  Hearing the experienced Pirate arguing with the AI was not boosting the confidence of Reed’s copilot. Beazer was a lieutenant in the Royal Air Force and he had flown one of the Kristang Dragon dropships that was controlled by the French. The sophisticated Thuranin Falcon was significantly more capable, if a bit more tricky to fly. His first flight at the controls of a Thuranin dropship had been when he accompanied Reed down to Barbados, and on that flight, he had been instructed not to touch the controls unless there was an extreme emergency. Despite spending nearly every waking moment in a simulator or actually flying dropships while the star carrier recharged its drive between jumps, he knew he was woefully inexperienced for such a vital mission. “Mister Skippy, you can really do this?”

  “Can I slip our Thuranin dropship through overlapping sensor fields monitored by a species that possesses technology equivalent to the Thuranin? If we disturb even one field line of a single sensor net, that data will feed back at to the sensor node at close to the speed of light, an alarm will sound, and this whole area will be barraged by active sensor pulses that will pinpoint our location regardless of our own stealth field? Can I, as we pass through the sensor fields, reshape those fields as if we were never there at all, despite the horrible complication that the main defense network tracks not only the individual fields but also the very tricky interactions between the fields, interactions that have quantum effects even I find difficult to anticipate and predict? Can I do all that, plus monitor how the gravity of the moon you want to land on warps the sensor fields, requiring me to adjust my feedback in real-time as you descend? Can I do all that, from my comfy spot aboard the Flying Dutchman, hundreds of thousands of kilometers away from you?”

  “Was that a question or an answer?” Beazer looked to Reed for help but she only shook her head.

  “The answer is simple,” Skippy assured the new member of the Merry Band of Pirates. “Trust. The. Awesomeness. Listen, Beazer, I know you are new around here-”

  “Colonel Bishop told me to trust the awesomeness.”

  “Well, good. Joe did something right for a change. In this case-”

  “He said we have to trust the awesomeness, because we don’t have a choice.”

  “That is true,” Skippy agreed happily. “You monkeys are hopeless without me.”

  “He also said you are an asshole,” Beazer added.

  “Sadly, yes, that is entirely true. However, it is also true that I got this, so sit back, relax and enjoy the ride. Unless, you know, something disrupts my connection to the microwormhole event horizon in Colonel Smythe’s backpack, because that magical little rip in spacetime is what provides instantaneous communications between me and your Falcon. Or unless you move the Falcon abruptly, in which case there is no way I can compensate quickly enough. Or if the Bosphuraq sensor field controller makes an unscheduled change that throws off the quarter-second lead I have for predicting the field shape in front of your flightpath. Or if, well, there are a billion things that could go wrong for you out there. Truly, if anything goes wrong, heh heh, you are seriously skuh-rewed. Makes me glad that I am nice and safe aboard a starship that can jump away at the first sign of danger, huh? Gosh, you monkeys are so brave to be risking your lives out there, relying on a beer can who has been known to be a teensy bit absent-minded from time to time. Hey, that reminds me, did I ever tell you the joke about-”

  “Focus,” Reed gritted her teeth. “On. The task. Please.”

  “Sure thing, no problemo. I got it covered. Um, what was I doing again?”

  That flight was the most nerve-wracking experience of Jeremy Smythe’s life, a life filled with nerve-wracking experiences. Any transport in or out of a mission tested his patience, and too often the ingress flight was the most hazardous part of the mission profile. That might not be true on the current mission, for his team needed to infiltrate a secure military base, neutralize all the advanced aliens inside, and take control without the other military bases in the area knowing anything was wrong or unusual until it was too late.

  The flight still tested his deep reserves of patience and his ability to ignore distractions and focus on what he could do to control his fate, and the fate of his team. Inside the pack attached to the back of his powered armor suit, there was a very special canister, a canister which held the key to the entire mission. While Bishop would call the canister a ‘doodad’ or a ‘dingus’, Smythe thought of it in more proper terms, as a Thermos. The Thermos he carried, along with its power supply, was no larger than a travel size can of shaving cream or ladies hair spray, though it weighed close to ten pounds. Inside that Thermos, rather than hot coffee, was a magnetic system that securely held in place one end of a microwormhole, with the other end aboard the Flying Dutchman. Smythe amused himself by imagining he could open the Thermos, stick his finger through the microwormhole, and his finger would wiggle at the snarky beer can. What would Skippy think of that, Smythe had thought with a silent chuckle. He knew it was impossible anyway, for the microwormhole was much too small for a finger to fit through.

  Mission planning had run into a stumbling block when it was realized Skippy the Magnificent needed to be in two places, potentially at the same time. He was needed with the away team to infiltrate and take over the moonbase, but he might very shortly after be needed elsewhere for the phase to steal a Maxolhx dropship. The solution was for Smythe to carry a microwormhole with him in a sort of Thermos bottle, allowing Skippy to extend his presence far from the ship while the Flying Dutchman remained safely in stealth far away from nosy sensor fields.

  “Halfway through the enemy sensor fields,” Skippy reported. “We are looking good. The field interactions are more complex than I expected, I had to throw out my original software model and create and test a new one on the fly. There was a really scary nanosecond there, whew! Am I ever glad that is over. I think. Can’t make any promises. Hey, Jeremy, how are you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “That’s it? Fine? You-”

  “Could you not distract me, or yourself, at the present moment, if you don’t mind? And please call me ‘Smythe’ while we are in the field.”

  “Ah. Got the message. Well, mapping a path through the sensor fields is occupying seventeen percent of my resources, this is tricky work. I will, um, talk with you later.”

  Jeremy Smythe occupied himself wi
th calming exercises like deep breathing, to conserve his energy for the ground mission ahead, and to keep his mind off the fact that he had almost no control over his fate. His team was unusually quiet and he did not have enough experience with them to know whether that was an issue, or just the way that group of people approached combat. Other than the three Delta Force soldiers, none of them had served together long and had not yet formed the bonds of trust that gave them confidence to rely on each other. What did worry him, more than the extremely complicated operation against a vastly superior species, was that his current team had never been in action together. He knew he could rely on Poole, who was the only other experienced Pirate on the STAR team. No amount of deep breathing could make him feel good about taking an untested group into a desperate mission when anything could go wrong along the way, and nothing could be allowed to go wrong with the outcome. He would feel better once they were on the ground, and he could-

  “Um,” Skippy’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Oopsy. Oh, Colonel Smythe, we may have a slight problem.”

  All the effects of calming exercises were erased in a split-second. “How slight?”

  “Somewhere between ‘armageddon’ and ‘the universe hates me’?”

  “Poppycock! Neither of those are a slight problem.”

  “Oh, when I said ‘slight’ I was grading on a Merry Band of Pirates scale. You never have actual ‘slight’ problems, so-”

  “What is the problem this time?” The Falcon was fully in the detection zone of the moonbase’s sensor field. The only reason their dropship had not been noticed was because Skippy was actively reshaping the stealth field that was tightly wrapped around the ship and using the field to move the field lines back to where they would have been if the Falcon had not passed through them. To accomplish that nearly-impossible task, the beer can had to detect extremely small changes in the field and anticipate future variations, in overlapping fields that had complex interactions. Even for His Arrogant Awesomeness, it was no easy task. Plus, he had never done it before, so he had to guess part of the process and adjust along the way.

  “First, this is not anything that is my fault, except, hmm, maybe I should have checked the moonbase’s flight schedule that is shared with the two battlestations to avoid creating a navigation hazard. Anywho, heh heh, nothing I can do about that now, right? So-”

  “Answer the bloody question, please,” Smythe’s cool British reserve was slipping already, and the team had not yet put boots on the ground. “What is the problem?”

  “Ok, Ok. Two fighter-dropships just launched from the moonbase. They are going on a deep-space mission and will not be a problem for the mission schedule, except that they are not climbing straight up away from their launch pad. Instead, the lead fighter is using the flight as an opportunity to teach dogfighting techniques to the other pilot, who is new to the squadron. Because they evolved from birds, the Bosphuraq fancy that they have a natural advantage as pilots over other species, and they are famously fond of hotshot craziness.”

  “Their course will take them close enough to detect us?”

  “What? No way, dude. As if! No way could the crappy sensors on one of those fighters see through my stealth field. Perish the thought.”

  “Then,” Smythe felt his reserves of patience melting like an ice cube in the hot sands of a desert. “What, precisely, is the problem?”

  “Those fighters are distorting the sensor fields in ways I cannot predict and cannot fully compensate for. The moonbase knows about those fighters, so when they distort the overlapping sensor fields, the detection system does not send out an alarm. The problem is, the fighters could make it impossible for me to predict the shape of the field around the Falcon and adjust so your passage through the field is not detected. I am already at thirty-seven percent of my capacity to fully adjust for distortions in the field, and the fighters are still down near the surface, they have not commenced their climb.”

  “Could we turn around?” Smythe suggested, knowing the pilots were listening to the alarming conversation. “Fly back out of the field, try again later?” His mind was racing to decide whether it would be best to wait until the fighters had flown away to try again, or whether they should scrub the mission for the day and fly back to the Dutchman. He needed to consider that the long flight in the cramped quarters of the Falcon was affecting the readiness of his team, was already making even him tired. Smythe had wanted to fly in a big Condor dropship, but they only had one of those craft left, and Skippy had advised the smaller Falcon would be easier to slip through the sensor field. So, Smythe had been forced to limit the size of his team and the equipment they brought with them. Several of the team were jammed into gaps between partially-folded Thuranin combots, in positions that left them little room to move around and avoid muscle cramps.

  “Um, no, too late for that,” Skippy dashed any thought of trying again later. “We are closer to the surface than to the outer edge of field coverage. Being closer to the sensor field emitters makes it easier for me to predict changes, and right now we need all the advantages we can get.”

  “What are our options, then?”

  “Um, prayer? That’s what I’d go with if I were you,” the beer can offered unhelpfully.

  “That is not encouraging.”

  “Hey, it’s not my fault if you get punished for being bad person, or if the Almighty is testing your righteous faith, or whatever excuse you use when bad shit happens.”

  “Right. Prayer it is, then. While we do that,” he saw the fright in the eyes of the pilots when he acknowledged that divine intervention might be their best hope. “Could you amuse yourself by calculating the odds that the actions of those fighters will overwhelm your capacity to compensate?”

  “Um, that would not be a good idea. Calculating the odds requires crunching a lot of variables, doing that eats up even my processing capacity. The fighters have started to climb, I just used seventy two percent of my capacity when their dogfighting distorted the field almost beyond my ability to adjust. I’m going to be quiet now so I can concentrate, I will feed a ‘Capacity Used’ indicator to your displays.”

  Instead of having to sit quietly and do nothing to control his fate while pilots flew the spacecraft, he and his entire team had to sit quietly and watch a single number on the display that was built into the rear of the cockpit bulkhead. That number was the percentage being used of Skippy’s capacity to adjust the stealth field to avoid detection.

  The percentage fluctuated between sixty two and eighty eight, with every upward tick in the value causing breaths to be held, and every downward increment causing quiet gasps in the dropship’s cabin. The nerve-wracking situation continued until the number briefly hit ninety four and Smythe’s heart skipped a beat. “C-colonel Bishop,” he had to swallow because his mouth was too dry to speak. “If you have any suggestions,” the number dropped to eighty six then popped up to ninety two and held. If the value reached one hundred even for a moment, the Falcon would be detected and the mission would be over along with humanity’s hopes for survival. “We would greatly appreciate them, now.”

  “I have been thinking about it, Smythe,” Bishop replied.

  “If you are concerned about stepping on my toes-”

  “No, I, I just don’t have a solution. Believe me, I have been trying. Those pilots are hotshots and they have an opportunity to play with their toys, there is no way to-”

  After a pause during which Smythe feared the connection to the starship had been lost, he asked “Sir? What were you going to say?”

  “Give me a minute, I’m thinking.”

  “We might not have a minute, Sir.”

  “Oh for-” There was the sound of a hand slapping a forehead. “I’m an idiot. Smythe, do not argue with me, you don’t have time. Skippy, I know you can’t hack into the moonbase AI yet, but can you intercept communications?”

  “Um, yes, I assume you mean communications between the fighters and the moonbase? The Falcon is n
ot positioned between the fighters and their base, but I can intercept signals. I must warn that if you are thinking of a crazy stunt like blowing up those fighters-”

  “Nope. Listen, if those fighters flew a nice, straight, predictable course, could you compensate for how they distort the stealth field?”

  “Uh, yeah, duh. The problem is those fighter jocks think this is Top Gun and they-”

  “Shut up and do what I tell you,” Bishop blurted out. “Fake a message from the base that instructs the fighters to fly straight, whatever course is best for your prediction work. Tell the fighters some bullshit like the base wants to test the sensor field, something like that.” The critical value hit ninety seven percent while the Flying Dutchman’s captain spoke. “Also fake a message from the fighters to base that their dogfighting is over, and the flight leader intends to see how the newbie pilot can fly a straight course, or whatever you think the moonbase duty officer would believe. You can do that?”

  “Doing it now,” Skippy’s voice held more than a bit of admiration. “Joe, you have a genius for getting the enemy to do what we want them to do, and make them think it was their idea.”

  “Uh huh, great. Save your congratulations for after the Falcon gets to the surface.”

  Smythe watched the displayed number almost immediately drop into the fifty percent range, then down to fluctuate in the mid- to upper-twenties. “That is better than it was before the fighters launched,” he observed with carefully controlled words, concealing the after-effects of his adrenaline surge from his team.

  “Yup,” Skippy agreed like it was the most obvious thing in the universe. “With those fighters flying a straight course at a steady velocity, I can remotely observe how they are distorting the field at their location, that allows me to better predict the shape of the field at your position. Those fighters are actually helping us. Whatever prayer you said, it was a good one.”