At the time the Maxohlx found that Elder site, and its massive destructive potential, they already had a substantial arsenal of Elder devices that could be used as weapons against the Rindhalu. According to Skippy's admittedly foggy memories, the Rindhalu discovered that the Maxohlx planned to attack them, and forced their hand. The Maxohlx had to accelerate their plans, and launched the attack before they were completely ready. The Rindhalu hit back with their own stock of Elder weapons, and a war raged for a brief period, before Sentinels detected the use of Elder weapons, and struck at both sides. The Sentinels, intelligent monitors left behind by the Elders to prevent unauthorized use of Elder technology by younger species, did not care that the Maxohlx had fired first. They did not even seem to care where in the galaxy Elder weapons had been used; Maxohlx and Rindhalu star systems far from the fighting were hit by Sentinels, with devastating effect. The purpose of the Sentinels seemed to be to destroy star-faring civilizations; civilizations capable of abusing Elder technology, whether they had acquired such technology or not. Both the Maxohlx and the Rindhalu feared extinction, so powerful and relentless were the Sentinels. Then, suddenly, for no known reason, the Sentinel attack halted, and the Sentinels disappeared and went dormant. Sleeping, again, but always watchful.
Since that time, the shocked Maxohlx and Rindhalu had held their Elder weapons in reserve, and continued their long war through proxies such as the Thuranin and Jeraptha, who had proxies of their own. And the Elder site that the Maxohlx had been exploring at the time the Sentinels struck had been off limits to everyone, by general agreement. Skippy thought that, since he was built by the Elders, he could get us there without being detected by the extensive web of sensors left by the Maxohlx. His plan sucked; after a four month journey to get close to the site, we would fly in normal space for another six months, sneaking up on the target by crawling slowly along. The Flying Dutchman could not slow down much, as firing the engines would risk detection, so we would need to fly across the final distance to the target in dropships. Landing teams would spend almost a month in dropships, under Skippy's crappy plan. After we located and picked up a communications node, the landing teams would fly back to the Dutchman, and the ship would continue traveling silently through normal space for another four months, before we could risk a jump. Skippy's plan sucked. He wanted us to commit to a fourteen month voyage, into an area of space that was closely monitored by both the Maxohlx and Elder Sentinels, because he thought we had a good chance of finding a comm node. I hated his plan, I told him that. I also did not have an alternative plan.
Before committing to the second target, we were going to investigate the first target, the supposedly abandoned Kristang space station. Hopefully, we would find a comm node there. If not, I had maybe a week to think up an alternative to Skippy's second target.
I needed to put my thinking cap on.
CHAPTER FOUR
Before we investigated the abandoned space station for real, we practiced maneuvers in vacuum and zero gravity. I ordered the ship to halt in interstellar space, and Desai flew the Flower a short distance away, to act as a target. Then, several teams practiced getting into a small dropship, flying over near the Flower, and people in suits crossed the remaining distance to the Flower as an assault team. Using Kristang powered armor suits in deep space was very different from playing around with them in a cargo hold. Many times, Skippy had to seize control of suits to prevent the wearers from hurting themselves or others. We all learned together, slowly. The suits by themselves had small thruster units, which allowed the wearer to prevent spinning out of control, the suit thrusters weren't much use for flying across distances. We had a sort of jetpack that could be attached to a suit, the jetpacks were bulky, and we only had fourteen of them, and we shouldn't need them to get across the short distance between a dropship airlock and the space station. What we practiced was one person launching him or herself from the dropship's airlock, carrying a line. When the line was firmly attached to the Flower, the rest of the team followed by pulling themselves along the line. We also practiced recovering people who had gone spinning off into space, that was good practice for our inexperienced dropship pilots. And if many of those people had gone spinning off into space by accident, that only made the recovery exercise more realistic. One of those unfortunate people who had accidently gone spinning off into space and needed to be recovered had a name like 'Shmoe Bishop', that guy really felt like an idiot.
After two full days of intensive exercises, during which every SpecOps team and every pilot had multiple opportunities for practice, I was satisfied that we were ready enough to investigate the space station for real.
We approached our very first target slowly and carefully, initially jumping in to the far edge of the star system, and sitting there quietly for eighteen hours. Our passive sensors listened for any sign of activity, no matter how faint, and found nothing. Next we jumped in about a million kilometers from the target, and listened for six hours, although Skippy complained that he'd gotten all the useful data in the first three hours. So, I listened to him complain for fifteen hours, that was a real treat for me.
Finally, we went to battle stations, and jumped within a hundred thousand kilometers of the supposedly abandoned space station. The pilots were on a hair trigger for an emergency jump away, they didn't need to wait for an order from the duty officer. "Skippy," I asked anxiously, "what do you think? Is this place really abandoned?"
"Give me a break, Joe, I'm stuck with the speed of light here, everything is incredibly freakin' slow. There are no ships in the area. The whole area certainly appears to be dead, nothing out there is generating power. What I can't tell yet is whether there are any hazards like stealthed mines. That's what I'm scanning for now, with this ship's crappy sensors, it will take an hour for a full grid search. I have to warn you, Joe, in order to verify there are no booby-traps inside the station, we need to move the ship close. I'm talking about physical devices, like explosives attached to airlocks, that sort of thing. I need to be closer, like within twelve thousand kilometers."
"Ooooh." Twelve thousand kilometers, that sounded way too close to me. The distances involved in space combat were hard to comprehend, all my military experience involved line of sight warfare. Even in space, with nothing between me and the target, I couldn't actually see anything from twelve thousand kilometers away. The problem with space combat was the enormous distances involved, distances so vast that even light took seconds or minutes to cross the gap. Against the distances separating combatants were the speeds of the weapons; masers, particle beams, hypervelocity railguns, missiles that could accelerate at five thousand times the force of gravity. From our position a mere one hundred thousand kilometers away from the station, we were in danger from speed of light weapons, which our shields could deflect long enough for us to jump away. If we went in only twelve thousand kilometers, a railgun or even a missile could close that distance, punch right through our shields and knock out a reactor, before we could jump. Did I want to take the risk of bringing the ship in that close? "Can we send a dropship instead?"
"No, I need this ship's sensors. This may all look like magic to you monkeys, Joe, but this is technology, and even for me, it has limits."
"Damn. All right, Pilot," I said to Desai, "bring us in. If you think anything is a threat out there, don't wait for me, jump us away."
"Aye, aye, sir," she acknowledged.
There were no threats, and, Skippy declared, no booby-traps. At least, no booby-traps in the outer layers of the station structure. The space station appeared to be exactly what that data Skippy captured said it was; an abandoned wreck. From twelve thousand kilometers, we could clearly see holes had been blasted in it, jagged holes, and there were structures that had been torn away like tissue paper, with pipes and cables sticking out. Because people could get tangled up in those cables flopping around, we needed to avoid those areas. That was not a problem, we located several airlocks with no obstructions, and easy approa
ches for a dropship. There was also an open docking bay, plenty large enough for several dropships, it was tempting, maybe too tempting. I wanted a dropship to be able to get away quickly, that meant avoiding confined areas like an open docking bay that could be a trap.
What I decided was for a single one of our smaller dropships to go in, with two pilots, me, Giraud, and two others. Giraud had removed the healing sleeve from his arm and found that it was very nearly as strong as the other arm, and he declared himself fit for duty. Doctor Skippy agreed, that was good enough for me. Desai backed the Flying Dutchman off to fifty thousand kilometers away, and I left Chang in command. As the two pilots of the dropship were British, I chose Captain Xho of the Chinese team and Captain Chander of the Indian team to go in with me and Giraud, to make our initial exploration team truly international. It was very important, I thought, to avoid the appearance of me playing favorites among the five nations that comprised UNEF.
The pilots parked the dropship fifty meters away from the airlock we selected, and we opened the dropship's own airlock. Giraud went first, he flew across the fifty meters of vacuum and missed the airlock by only a meter, he was able to grasp a handhold and pull himself over to the airlock and attach the line. I followed, with the Indian and Chinese soldiers right behind, pulling ourselves along the line. The armored glove of Giraud's hand touched the airlock door, and nothing happened. "I suppose it's too much to hope the power is still on," he said, bending down to peer at the dust-covered panel to the right of the door, "after all this time." Moving as carefully as he could, he tried to brush the accumulated layer of dust away from the panel, most of it smeared, or clung to his gloves. "That didn't work," he complained, "we should have brought a brush with us, or a towel. Where did all this dust come from?"
"Debris from the battle that caused the station to be abandoned," Skippy explained. "The station's surface was slightly magnetized from its defensive shield, when the shield was deactivated, particles were attracted to it. There is not that much dust, Captain, the problem is your gloves are only smearing it around."
"Do you see any lights on the panel, Giraud?" I asked. The view from his helmet camera was available on the inside of my helmet faceplate, I could toggle the display either on my left wrist pad, or with my chin, although I hadn't quite gotten the knack of doing it with my chin, I kept flipping the display back and forth annoyingly. The view from his helmet camera was distracting, he was moving around too much. I pulled myself over next to him, far enough away not to hover over his shoulder and distract him.
"It's hard to tell," he answered, "the light is very harsh here, without an atmosphere to filter it." Giraud had a good point, all of our zero gravity training had been in deep interstellar space, with artificial lights provided by the Dutchman, the Flower or a dropship. We should have, I should have, thought of how being in intense starlight would affect people in suits.
"All right, we can't stay out here, try the handle," I ordered. The door, like almost all airlocks, had a manual release mechanism, for use in case of power failure. This door had a nice big, obvious lever, painted yellow and red, on the right side.
"Trying it now," Giraud said.
I could see his right hand reach out and grasp the lever, then turn it to the left. Immediately, a loud trilling sound blasted out of my helmet speakers. "Get out of there!" I shouted. "Retreat! Ret- wait, wait. Everyone, wait." I recognized that trilling sound from somewhere. The trilling sound repeated, then I heard voices, human voices, it was difficult to make out what they were saying. "Skippy, what, what the hell is that?"
"Oh, that's ‘Soul Finger’ by the Bar-Kays."
"Soul F-. Oh! My! God! What the hell is that song doing all the way out here?" I looked around, everyone I could see had their mouths agape with astonishment. Why in the hell did a Kristang space station, abandoned hundreds of years ago, have a human 1960s funk R&B song as a door alarm? My brain almost locked up in confusion.
"What? Duh, it doesn't, Joe, the real airlock alarm is a boring 'beep beep' sound, I spiced up the signal for you over your helmet speakers. Oh, hey, you dumb monkeys thought that was real? Oh, man, this is freakin' hilarious! Hahahahahahahahaha! Oh, damn, Joe, you should have seen the expression on your faces. Hahahaha! Man, now that was truly priceless! Damn! I got to do that again sometime."
I was pissed. "No, you got to do that again, never. Understand? You scared the hell out of me, Skippy. That could have been dangerous, if someone had moved too quickly and been injured. Everyone, do you see now the crap I have to put up with from our friendly beer can?"
"Colonel," Giraud responded, "I've told you before, any time you want Skippy to take a long ride out an airlock, you let me know, I'll be happy to do it for you."
We got the door open, and the inner door, and discovered there was a thin residual atmosphere in parts of the station. Skippy warned us not to try popping open our faceplates and sniffing the air. It was too thin, he reported, and contaminated with dangerously toxic chemicals left over from the battle. Skippy didn't need to warn us; no one was tempted to open our space suits.
The inside of the station looked very much like the inside of the Flower, a standard Kristang design that had changed little in several hundred years. Our captured frigate the Flower itself was almost two hundred years old, and Skippy said the Kristang were still building frigates that were almost identical today.
Our investigation of the space station took two full days, and was a complete bust. We found only a few, useless pieces of Elder artifacts. It wasn't clear who was more bitterly disappointed; me or Skippy. After forty six straight hours of rotating teams in and out of the station, we had poked our noses into every nook and cranny of the place, and not found anything useful. "Skippy, is there any point to us staying here longer? The Kristang put a space station here because an Elder starship broke apart in orbit, is there a chance they missed something? Should we scan space around the planet, see if we find any Elder artifacts?"
"I already did that, Joe," Skippy responded, "space around here is empty of anything useful, the lizards did a good job of picking up all the valuable pieces. They should have, this station was operational here almost two hundred years before the conflict damaged it, plenty of time to survey every cubic meter of space for a half million kilometers from the planet. Even dumdum lizards couldn't miss finding all the good stuff when they have two hundred years to do it. The answer is no, there is no point to us remaining here any longer, unless you find it useful for crew training."
The Flying Dutchman had hung motionless in space, exposed, for far too long. I wanted us to get the hell out of there and on to our next objective. Our next objective, which we still hadn't decided on. I ordered an end to the exploration effort, as soon as the Chinese team aboard the station could be extracted. "Colonel Chang," I said over my zPhone, "we're pulling out, get your team back aboard the dropship as soon as you can do so safely."
"Yes, sir," Chang replied, "this is a good opportunity for training, but there is nothing useful for us over here. We'll be back aboard the Dutchman within an hour."
News that we were pulling out quickly spread throughout the ship, and within less than ten minutes, Skippy called me while I was in my office. “Joe, Doctor Venkman is on her way to see you, the science team asked her to talk to you about-”
“Skippy? Are you about to tell me something you overhead? Remember the talk we had about privacy?”
“Sure, but-”
“Does whatever you heard pose a threat to the ship?”
“No, but-”
“Listen, Skippy, you want people to treat you as a person, and not as a computer, right?”
“Yes.”
“Here is what a person would do, assuming the person is a friend; he would simply say something like ‘head’s up, dude, Venkman’s on her way to pester you’.”
“I am not calling you, ‘dude’, Joe. How about ‘chum’?”
“Damn, Skippy, you need some context on your understanding o
f slang. Nobody has used the word ‘chum’ that way since, like, nerdy English boarding schools in the 1930s. Chum is fish guts you throw over the side of the boat as bait.”
“Hmm. You sure about that?”
“Pretty sure, yeah. You call someone ‘chum’ and that majorly sets off their social awkwardness alarm.”
“Huh. Damn, you monkeys just came out of the freakin’ trees, and already you’ve got inscrutable social rules. All right, how about if I simply say ‘Joe, Venkman’s on the warpath and she’s on the way to your office’?”
“Now that’s cool, Skippy, you’re getting the idea.”
“Unbelievable. An entire galaxy for me to learn about, after being asleep for a million years, and what am I cluttering up my memory with? The current social customs of filthy, ignorant monkeys. Oh, man, I am totally wasting my life.”
“How much unused memory do you have? Like, uh,” I tried to remember a ginormous number that was in some Wikipedia article I had glanced at, “it’s measured in yottabytes, something like that?”
“Ha! A puny yottabyte? Hahahahahahahahaha!” For a moment, he was laughing so hard, he couldn’t speak. “Damn that is precious! Joey, a yottabyte is such a tiny part of my memory capacity, I couldn’t measure something that small. A yottabyte,” he chuckled, “that’s a good one. Ha!”
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 5