Anyway, aliens did invade, and I became a colonel. With our secret unraveling on Earth, the brass probably could not take a public relations hit by busting me back down to sergeant, but after some of the shit I had done, the Army would not be eager to see me continuing service. The United States Army is a team, and The Big Green Machine succeeds because soldiers act together as a team, for the good of the team. Hotshot cowboys are not encouraged in the Army, and with a few exceptions I still felt guilty about, I agreed with that philosophy. If Earth truly was safe in the long term or even medium term, the Army would probably be very grateful if I quietly resigned and disappeared from the public’s attention.
The prospect of the fighting being over made me think about how Army officers must have felt when WWII was winding down. They were happy that the killing and dying and suffering would soon be over, and they were looking forward to seeing their families again, but some of them had mixed feelings, because all they had known for years was war. All I had known since Columbus Day was fighting against aliens, and my home planet being in mortal danger. The people of Earth being safe was great, no question about it. My problem was, I had gotten used to being useful, to doing something important. What was I going to do with the rest of my life, if I was going to be stuck on Earth?
Ah, I could worry about that later, I did not really believe our mission was over.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe it.
“Hey Joe,” Skippy’s avatar popped to life on my desk. “You look unhappy? What’s wrong? You should be thrilled! As much as you can be thrilled, considering that no matter what happens, you are a filthy monkey at the bottom of the development ladder.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I paused the game I had been playing and losing. Really, I had not been so much playing the game as staring at my laptop display, doing nothing.
“You guess so? Humanity is safe for hundreds of years because of you! Well, you and a barrel of monkeys. And me. Mostly me, really, but you monkeys can take a teeny bit of the credit. The Maxolhx have no reason to ever go to the squalid slum you call home, and because of your genius idea- If you ever tell anyone I called you a genius I will deny the whole thing-”
“Of course,” that did make me smile.
“Because of your idea, aliens will ignore the gamma rays coming from Earth’s wormhole when those photons reach sensors sixty lightyears from the far end of the wormhole. You only have to worry about aliens detecting radio and TV transmissions that show all the Kristang here got wiped out, and a Thuranin star carrier has been regularly visiting your planet. There is nothing we can do about that, but maybe no one out there will be paying attention to those faint signals from Earth because, hey, why would they? Now, you will be going back home with the good news that you have a good idea to set up a Beta site. Your United Nations certainly should be thrilled about it. Thrilled enough to forget about all the incredibly bonehead shit you’ve done. Maybe not forget, but they could agree to sweep your past under the rug. Neat, huh?”
“Yeah, neat. Skippy, my problem is you may be right about the war being over for us. For me. That is great, I am happy about that.”
“You don’t sound happy,” he observed, hands on his little hips.
“I’m wondering, what can I do next? I can’t continue serving as an Army officer in peacetime, the Army can’t just forget about me stealing a starship.”
“Well, um,” he took off his ginormous hat and scratched his chrome-plated skull. “What can you do? That is a good question. I mean, you are not really good at anything in particular, so-”
“Thanks so much for boosting my confidence.”
“You could try that life of crime thing I suggested.”
“Let’s try something else first, Ok?”
“Ok, Ok,” he jammed the hat back on his head and rubbed his chin. “What can Joey do? I suppose appearing as a side show at a carnival is out?”
“That would not be my first choice, no.”
“Ooh! Ooh! Hey, I got it! The only useful thing you’ve done out here is dreaming up whacky ideas to solve impossible problems, right?”
“I think I’ve done a little more than, that, Skippy.”
“It’s cute you think that. How about you use your one so-called ‘talent’ on Earth, to solve their impossible problems?”
That thought perked me up. “Like what?” Crap, I hoped he did not mention something truly impossible like ‘peace in the Middle East’.
“How about this, Joe; can you find a way to achieve humanity’s long-held dream?”
“Uh, what is that?”
“Combining,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, ‘Taco Tuesdays with Thirsty Thursdays.”
“Oh, shit.”
“See? If you could do that, all of monkeykind would rejoice.”
“Yeah, that, that is really super helpful, Skippy. Thanks a bunch,” I sighed.
“Well,” he sniffed, upset that I didn’t embrace his idea. “While you are moping around feeling sorry for yourself, stop playing that stupid game and do something educational. I just loaded a crossword puzzle on your laptop.”
“Um, Skippy, this crossword is all in French. I don’t read French.”
“Yeah, so? You suck at crosswords anyway, you think that will make a difference?”
He had a point. Oh, hell, I could always look up the words in a translator. I didn’t have anything else to do before we reached Earth.
We arrived back in Earth orbit, only seven hundred miles off target after a very long jump. The good news is, we didn’t emerge in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, vaporize the ship and cause a massive tidal wave. I counted that as a major win. “This is Colonel,” I emphasized my rank, “Bishop of the UNS Flying Dutchman,” I reported with a smile that was reflected in my voice. “Returning from a successful mission. The two Maxolhx ships have been destroyed. Details are in the report that-”
“Colonel Bishop,” a red-faced US Air Force general I did not recognize broke into my prepared monologue. “The President wants to speak with you. Immediately.”
Oh, crap. What could it be this time? “About, uh, what, Sir?”
“This.”
The general’s face was replaced by an image of a crowd carrying signs and marching down a street in some generic American city, they spanned sidewalk to sidewalk and stretched back a full city block.
At first, I blinked, wondering why I should care about yet another group protesting the latest thing they had decided to take offense about. Then I realized they were all wearing the same color shirts or jackets or robes.
Silver.
The camera zoomed in on signs carried by the people in front of the march. The signs were blue, with a glowing silver ball on top, from which silver rays spread outward. The bottom half had silver lettering.
Skippy loves us all. Don’t be a dick.
THE END
Author’s note:
Thank you 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 a
nd 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 one. 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 [email protected]
https://www.facebook.com/Craig.Alanson.Author/
https://twitter.com/CraigAlanson?lang=en
Go to craigalanson.com for blogs and ExForce logo merchandise including T-shirts, patches, sticker, hats, and coffee mugs
The Expeditionary Force series
Book 1: Columbus Day
Book 2: SpecOps
Book 3: Paradise
Book 3.5: Trouble on Paradise novella
Book 4: Black Ops
Book 5: Zero Hour
Book6: Mavericks
Book7: Renegades
Book8: Armageddon - coming summer 2019
Book9: Valkyrie – coming late 2019
Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7) Page 57