Mavericks (Expeditionary Force Book 6)

by Craig Alanson

  Expeditionary Force

  Book 6:

  Mavericks

  Craig Alanson

  Text copyright © 2018 Craig Alanson

  All Rights Reserved

  Contact the author

  craigalanson@gmail.com

  Cover Design By:

  Alexandre Rito

  alexandre@designbookcover.pt

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE

  CHAPTER ONE

  I had to let Skippy’s shocking last statement roll around in my brain for a moment before I could speak. “Perkins and her team are not on Paradise?”

  “Nope.” Skippy clarified unhelpfully.

  “Crap. Dammit, that pilot, Eileen-”

  “Irene,” he corrected me.

  “Irene, yeah. She didn’t like, take a wrong turn or something?”

  “Uh, no, Joe.”

  “Well, I assume they didn’t win a fabulous vacation cruise, so how the hell-”

  “Joe, while playing Twenty Questions with you would be immensely entertaining for me, we should jump away from here first.”

  “Oh, yeah. Desai,” I checked the list on the command chair’s armrest. Wherever we had to go to rescue Perkins, we first had to stop by a gas giant planet to fill the Dutchman’s depleted fuel tanks. “Jump option Alpha.”

  “Aye aye, Captain,” Desai replied and pressed a button. The only change on the main bridge display was the faint dot of the local star had disappeared, because we were now in interstellar space. If you were ever looking for nowhere, we were smack in the middle of it.

  “Ok, Skippy,” I took a deep breath and watched Hans Chotek silently fuming at me. “You’d better just tell us where Perkins is now, and what kind of trouble she’s gotten into this time.”

  “We have plenty of time for that later, Joe. I downloaded all the info to your tablets and laptops, you can read the whole story in detail any time you like. Right now, we need to prepare for the refueling operation. I suggest-”

  “Uh huh, sure,” I cut off the beer can before he could get into geeky technical details of the risky op to extract fuel. “How about you give us the elevator version of the story?”

  “Elevator version?” Skippy asked, puzzled, then he got excited. “Ooooh, you mean like elevator music? I suppose I could put the story into a musical format, like an epic opera. In fact, that is a great idea-”

  “No, that is a terrible idea!” I waved my hands while seeing panicked faces in the CIC. No one wanted to give Skippy an excuse to sing. “I meant, like an elevator pitch, you know?” I had read that concept in one of the US Army PowerPoint slides I was supposed to study for officer training. “Give us the thirty second version of the story.”

  “Oh,” the beer can’s hopes were crushed. “Oof,” he sighed. “All right, fine,” he said with disgust to make clear it was anything but fine to him. “To make a long story short, Perkins is-”

  The lights went out.

  All the lights, even the independently-powered emergency lights. My stomach did flipflops as the artificial gravity cut out completely, and it wasn’t the typical slow power-down of the gravity generators, this was someone flipping a switch from On to Off. So startling and sudden was the loss of power that instead of frightened cries of alarm from the crew, there was a brief moment of pure silence. Pure silence, like, no sound. No gentle hissing of air through the vents. No beeping from control panels. That was odd. What I picked up on immediately, what made my hair stand on end, was the loss of the faint rumbling sound of the reactor. Our new secondhand reactor that Skippy dug out of the junkyard in the Roach Motel had a different and lower-pitched sound than the Dutchman’s original reactors, and the new reactor had an intermittent vibration that had scared the hell out of me and kept me awake at night until I got used to it. Now, I was holding my breath hoping that scary vibration would be felt through my boots on the deck. Nothing.

  What scared me the most, made my insides freeze into a solid lump, was the absolute silence from Skippy.

  The silence was broken by everyone talking at once, although because the Merry Band of Pirates are highly disciplined bad-ass Special Operations troops, no one panicked. “Everyone, quiet please,” I asked in what was supposed to be a calm voice that came out as a broken squeak. “Skippy? Skippy, are you there?”

  Oh thank GOD! His beer can lit up with a soft blue glow, bright enough to illuminate the bridge, Combat Information Center and the passageway outside. “I’m here, Joe. Sorry about not responding immediately. I was superduper ultra busy.” Other lights began to show, as people pulled out their zPhones and activated the flashlight feature.

  “Everything is Ok with you, right? You didn’t go on holiday again?”

  “Huh? Nope. No, I’m fine. I was just super extra awesomely busy trying to determine why all the power cut out. The emergency power should have come on,” the red backup lighting snapped on as he spoke. “Like I said, emergency power is restored. Temporarily. Just local, independent systems are active, even the backup power is offline. Whew! Reactor containment was iffy there for a moment, kind of skating on the edge of disaster. I got it now. Damn, that was too close.”

  “What was too close? What went wrong?”

  “Still investigating that, Joe, lots of numbers to crunch. I suggest you get the crew preparing to get into spacesuits, escape pods, dropships, anything with an independent source of power. Although, damn it! The dropships are now powering down one by one. And the escape pods. Crap! Everything is shutting down!”

  “Skippy, we need some answers pronto. Can you-”

  “Joe, I am extremely busy right now. Like, with the superconducting magnets of the reactor containment system failing, I am the only thing preventing hot plasma from exploding and destroying the ship. Talk to you later,” he ended the conversation abruptly.

  Not knowing what had gone wrong was intensely frustrating, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it until Skippy analyzed the problem. If he couldn’t contain the radioactive plasma in the main reactor, we would not have any problems to analyze, so I left him alone to do whatever he was doing. I jammed a thumb down on the button to open the Dutchman’s 1MC intercom system, which fortunately broadcast to people’s zPhones through Skippy. “All hands, this is the captain. We have suffered,” what? I paused like an idiot. “An apparent engineering casualty,” I used the most vague term I could think of. At least the crew would be assured the problem was not caused by enemy action.

  Unless, crap, it was caused by some kind of enemy action, Skippy had not ruled that out.

  “Until
main power is restored, please,” I stuttered to a halt again. Please what? Abandon ship? That wasn’t the answer, especially with our dropships falling offline. “Get access to spacesuits, and secure extra powerpacks, as many as you can get.” While the suits were in storage, they were plugged into main power, to keep their internal powercells topped off and ready for immediate use. Main power was dead and dropships were powering down. Dropships in docking bays were plugged into umbilical power cables, even the ready bird we kept on Zulu alert. If whatever caused the problem with main power also traveled up the umbilical cables, then our spacesuits might be affected also. “Report in to the CIC when you have a functioning suit available. You do not need to put the suit on, or use supplemental oxygen at this time,” I added to avoid people using up their suit’s breathable air supply. The internal volume of the Dutchman’s hull contained enough air for almost a full day, though the air in populated compartments was going to get warm and stale quickly. I needed to consider dispersing people out of the CIC and galley and into cargo holds, any place with a large volume of air. Maybe if we kept all the internal doors open, that might slow the process of carbon dioxide building up in isolated areas of the ship? Uh, maybe instead of guessing, I should ask someone who knows actual sciency stuff?

  “Colonel,” Gunnery Sergeant Adams called out while floating beside my chair, holding a spacesuit she had pulled from a locker we installed in the CIC. Her face was lit up by the zPhone she was holding between two fingers, and because I am a moron, the first thought that flashed across my brain was something like ‘wow, she has really beautiful skin’ followed by me noticing for the first time how thick her eyelashes were. In my defense, she was floating right in front of my face and the zPhone was glowing from close to her right ear, so my eyes concentrated on what I could see in the overall dim lighting.

  Either that or I’m just a complete idiot. Let’s go with the first explanation.

  “Uh, what?” I shook my head to bring my brain back into focus.

  “This suit is dead,” she pointed to the status display on the spacesuit’s left wrist. The display was blank, not even the usual faint blue Standby indicator was glowing.

  “Oh, crap. Uh, wait,” I had a thought as my brain kicked into gear. “Disconnect the powercell, and swap in one of the spare powercells, one that wasn’t plugged in for charging.” We had more powercells than charging stations board the ship, so we had a schedule for rotating powercells to keep all of them fully charged. That is a task the crew performed even though Skippy had disdainfully insisted his bots could handle the job more efficiently. Efficiency is not the point, I had told him, the crew needed to take responsibility for assuring the readiness of critical equipment, if we could handle the job without screwing something up. That is why we maintained our personal weapons as best we could, and why we participated in regular maintenance chores for the combots, dropships and any other piece of equipment we could touch without risk of us blowing up the ship. Even if all pilots could do was hold tools for the bots working on dropships, the pilots would see what the bots were doing, and have at least some feeling of control over how their ships were maintained.

  One of the CIC crew heard me, reached into the locker for a spare powercell, and gently tossed it toward Adams. In the zero Gee, the powercell floated off course so I had to snatch it out of the air and hand it to Adams, taking the suit’s dead powercell from her.

  Powercells were designed to be swapped by someone wearing a suit, so ironically, it was more awkward to take one out and snap in a new one from outside the suit. The suit kept moving around until I saw the frustrated look on her face turning into a flash of anger. With her floating, she couldn’t get any leverage on the handle to swing the powercell into place, so I clamped the suit’s legs between my thighs and hugged the suit’s torso to my chest to hold it steady for her. She acknowledged my action with a silent nod, and her grimace turned to a smile as I heard the click of the powercell’s cover snapping into place. Instantly, the wrist display lit up. “Yes!” Her face glowed, and not just from the zPhone. “How did you know, Sir?” She looked at me with a combination of awe and suspicion.

  “I didn’t know, I was guessing,” I admitted. “When I heard the dropships were powering down, I wondered if whatever the fault is, travels along the umbilical cables.”

  “And suits in storage are plugged into charging stations,” she flashed a wry smile. “Good thinking, Sir. That’s why you get the big bucks.”

  “Ah, I got lucky. Simms!” I called through the glass separating the bridge from the CIC. “Notify the crew not to trust anything that was plugged in, and to replace their suit powercells with cells that were in storage.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Simms acknowledged and spoke into her zPhone. Although the ship’s comm system was down, Skippy could relay zPhone signals throughout the ship, until the zPhone powercells died.

  “I wonder,” Adams frowned, holding the dead powercell. “I’d like to try connecting this dead one to a powercell that is active.”

  “Ok,” I asked slowly, “why?”

  “I’d like to know whether this powercell is really dead, or if it got drained by running the charging system backwards or something,” she explained. “If it accepts a charge, it only got drained, and the powercell itself is Ok.”

  “Good idea, do that.”

  Simms waved for my attention. “All stations acknowledge, Colonel. We have confirmation that swapping powercells solves the suit problem,” she added to confirm our success was not a fluke. “Lieutenant Williams wants to try swapping powercells in a combot?”

  “Tell him permission granted, but let’s hold experiments to a minimum for now, we don’t want to risk our supply of good powercells. Adams?”

  “No joy, Sir,” she shook her head slowly. “Dammit, now the good powercell I connected to the dead one is also offline. Whatever the problem is, it must get transmitted through hard connections.”

  I snapped my fingers. “My tablet is in my office, sitting on a charging matt,” I stated, though it occurred to me that with the loss of artificial gravity, the tablet might now be floating out in the passageway. “Check if my tablet is dead, Gunny.”

  “Aye aye, Sir,” Adams said as she propelled herself out the door. Because my tiny office was just around a corner, she returned in seconds, wiping her face. Why was her face wet, and what was the dark stain on her uniform-Oh, yeah.

  “Sorry about the coffee, Sergeant,” I remembered right then that I had left a half cup of coffee on my desk, that liquid must have dispersed into the air when the gravity cut off. That was my fault, I had been thinking like my office was on firm ground somewhere, rather than on a ship. Would a Marine make such a bone-headed mistake? Maybe not, most Marines I knew tended to think in terms of being based aboard a ship. “Any luck?”

  “No,” she replied while gently pushing my tablet to me.

  I caught it and verified the thing was indeed totally dead. “Crap. Dammit, I’ve had this thing since before Columbus Day!”

  “Same tablet?” She asked in surprise. “That’s old for a tablet.”

  “It runs Skippy’s software, so it never needs updating,” I said defensively. “And I never had to think about a problem with it until now.” Crap. I bought that tablet before my old battalion got shipped out to Nigeria, I used it there sometimes to videochat with my folks back home, although the Wi-Fi connection out in the bush there had mostly been on the tin-cans-and-string level. I was proud when I bought that tablet, and it had been to the jungle and the stars and back with me. Was it now only a paperweight?

  Oh, hell, without artificial gravity it wasn’t even any kind of weight.

  “Major Simms, warn people not to trust anything connected to ship’s power, whether it’s a hard connection or not.” Simms passed the word, and within a minute, she reported that everyone aboard the ship had a spacesuit ready for use. Everyone except me, because I had been sitting uselessly strapped into the command chair.

&nb
sp; “Here you go, Sir,” Adams came to my rescue, pulling a spacesuit over to me and tying it to the back of the chair. “It’s ready to go,” she pointed to the blue glowing Standby indicator, “there are three spare good powercells attached to the waist belt.”

  “Thank you, Gunny,” I caught the eyeroll from her when I used the term ‘Gunny’ for her new rank. Adams didn’t think her field promotion was legit, especially when the promotion was granted by a sergeant masquerading as a colonel. I agreed with her about that second part, but she deserved to be a gunnery sergeant. If she was serving with the Marine Corps on Earth she almost certainly would have been promoted to an E-7 pay grade by now. So far, I had not insisted that Adams wear the patch with a second rocker to indicate her new status, but the ship’s crew log had her listed as Gunnery Sergeant, and I heard an increasing number of people calling her ‘Gunny’ whether she liked it or not. “Should we-”

  “Hey, Joe,” Skippy’s avatar popped to life in mid-air between bridge and CIC.

  “Skippy! Are the reactors good?”

  “I vented the plasma from the main reactor, there’s some minor damage to the hull from the emergency venting, nothing to worry about. Joe, we are in big F-ing trouble, I’m not going to sugar-coat it. Main and backup reactors are offline and I can’t restart them, because there is no power to the superconducting containment system. Almost every power-generation or power-storage system aboard the ship is dead, anything that was connected to the ship at the time of the incident. Even the jump drive capacitors are completely drained and in cold shutdown, totally dead.”

  “Yeah, we found that ourselves. Powercells that weren’t plugged in-”

  “Those backup powercells won’t last forever, and they will start going dead soon, as the problem migrates into power storage devices that don’t have a hard connection.”

  “Skippy, what the hell is going on?” If one of our ancient secondhand reactors shut down, I could understand that, because we picked them up from a junkyard. But the problem was not confined only to equipment we found in the junkyard.