"Oh. Ready now."
"Jump those ships into hell, Skippy."
"Done. Enhanced image in main display."
On the display, the two destroyers flared into existence within the gas giant planet's upper atmosphere. Immediately, their hulls began glowing hot pink as they fell rapidly down, down, down toward the planet's core. Pieces began breaking off the ships, the larger pieces tumbling and spinning away. Quickly, we lost sight of the ships, even in the enhanced image, as they were swallowed up the poisonous atmosphere. I held up my right hand and, flipped the bird to the image on the display. "Adios, MFers," I said quietly.
"Joe," Skippy said, "you surprised me. That was spiteful of you."
"Skippy, you know me as the doofus who jokes around with you. I am that, you need to understand that is only part of who I am. Right now, first, I am a soldier, I'm going to defend my ship, my crew and my species, above all else. Including getting a small measure of revenge once in a while."
"Got it. Especially since you acknowledged that you are a doofus."
That remark managed to draw a smile from my lips, as I watched the last pieces of the two destroyers disappear into the roiling clouds. "I wouldn't have it any other way. People, let's retrieve our landing party, before some other group of assholes show up here and spoil the party. Major Simms, signal Captain Desai to proceed to the main site, and for Colonel Chang to get his team moving toward the evac site. They can drop communications silence; I want a status report ASAP." Their heavily encrypted transmissions would not reveal the presence of humans in the star system. "Skippy, program a jump to take us over to that moon, please."
Desai responded almost immediately after we jumped in near the moon again. "Dutchman, we are off the ground, ETA at the main site is four minutes," she said, which meant she was really pushing the dropship's speed, we could hear the strain in her voice. "What happened up there?"
"A Kristang task force jumped in uninvited, apparently the planet is a popular refueling station, they must have the only clean bathrooms in this part of the galaxy."
"I find that hard to believe, sir," Desai laughed.
"That the planet is a gas station?" I asked, confused.
"No, that any gas station has clean bathrooms."
"Oh!" She made me laugh. Damn, she had been trapped on the moon's surface, out of communication, worried sick about the people stuck in their slowly-suffocating space suits, and still she had the good spirits to make me laugh. "You are probably right about that, Captain," I replied. "There were seven Kristang ships in the task force, four of them jumped away, to hitch a ride on a Thuranin star carrier."
"And the rest?"
"Scratch two destroyers and one battlecruiser."
"Roger that, Dutchman, I'd love to hear the details later. Any damage to my ship?" She understandably had referred to the Flying Dutchman as 'her' ship. I didn't mind at all, she had been flying the darned thing, I had only been giving orders.
"No damage, we didn't even fire a shot."
"Wow. Now I have to hear about this."
CHAPTER NINE
Lt. Colonel Chang had been even more happy to hear from us, and especially from Desai. She landed the big dropship as close as possible to the entrance to the underground building where Chang and his team had spent over a day hiding, waiting, waiting for rescue or for their oxygen to run out. As soon as the dropship was secured in the landing bay, I ordered a long jump, to get us far away from that star system. As a courtesy, I waited for Chang to get out of his no doubt stinking space suit, take a shower, drink a half gallon of water and grab a simple lunch before he gave me a briefing. "We're all fine now, Colonel," he reported while eating the last spoonful of soup, "those soldiers are all admirably disciplined. When we got your signal, I ordered them to lay down, rest and conserve oxygen, and that's what they did. No complaining, no talking. Mostly, we tried to sleep a lot, we kept one person awake at all times to listen for your signal. Other than watching our oxygen gauges move toward zero, and wondering what was going on upstairs, it was boring more than anything else."
"Your people were down in an access shaft?" I asked.
"Yes, we found an area of the site that appeared to not have been looted, there was no sign anyone had ever been there for a very long time, thick dust on the floor, no footprints. The entrance to the area was hidden, we found it by luck. It led to an access shaft, I sent four people down it, they got to the bottom and there was a corridor." He finished the last of the soup and pushed the bowl aside. "It was a dead end, appears to be maintenance access for the life support system. We didn't find anything useful down there."
"It was worth a shot, good call," I assured him, "you had no way to know we were about to have uninvited guests."
Chang nodded slowly. "In the future, we need to bring some sort of portable shelter that has oxygen, so we don't rely only on the suits."
"Agreed, we don't have anything like that aboard, we'll need to see if we can rig something up. We also, in the future, need to keep the landing party in one place, with a dropship nearby. If we're going to split up a landing party, we need multiple dropships," I concluded. That was a mild criticism, a lesson learned. There were a whole lot of lessons to be learned out here, for all of us.
Including Skippy. After talking to Chang, and seeing that the eleven others were doing well and eager to continue the mission, I went to my cubbyhole of an office, to get started on writing up an after-action report while it was fresh in my mind. "That was a waste of time," Skippy said bitterly, just as I sat down in my uncomfortable chair. "All that way, only to find an Elder site that has already been looted."
"It was not a waste of time, we already discussed this," I reminded him. "We proved your method of predicting unknown Elder sites is correct."
"Yeah, except this one wasn't unknown, it was located at a freakin' highway rest stop. There should have been a big glowing sign, like 'Big Mike's Truck Stop, low prices, great food, don't miss our Elder site attraction, get a free T-shirt'."
"Yeah, about that. Why wasn't that moon on your list of confirmed Elder sites, since everybody else in the whole galaxy knows about it?"
"Oh, uh, hmm. Maybe it was on my map, in retrospect. That may have been a teensy weensy screw up, on my part. Nothing worth mentioning."
"Nothing worth mentioning, you say? Skippy, you sent us into a star system that is a super highway of interstellar traffic. The only way that place could have more traffic, is if that Elder site was giving away free beer, or whatever the Kristang drink. And you told us the place was deserted, it has an unimpressive star, and no habitable planet. We almost had a landing party suffocate, because of your teensy weensy screw up. Please, indulge me, mention it."
"Oh, yeah, sure, blame me," he said defensively, "I had to process exabytes of pirated data to create my map, so excuse me if the final result needed some fine tuning. Now that I have that system as a data point, I know that Elder site was indeed on the map, it was mentioned in a side note. My assumption was that an Elder site would be featured prominently in any data about a star system, and that is true about all the other sites I was looking at. This particular site is a side note, precisely because it is so well known. Now that I know how such places are tagged in databases, I have identified six other similar sites, none of which are on our target list. More importantly, I have confirmed that the other, unknown, potential Elder sites on our list truly are not known to other spacefaring species."
"Unless an Elder site is known, and isn't in any database you have access to, because the species that knows about it wants to keep it secret."
"That is always a possibility, Joe," he said glumly, "nothing I can do about that. You're right, it was not a waste of time, it was, however, very disappointing. Now I have to wait, again, while we travel through empty space."
I tried to cheer him up. "Hey, you have been waiting a long time, what's another couple days?"
"The next target is ten days from here. That's more than a coup
le days, Joe."
"Less than two weeks!" I tried to be cheery about it.
"Two weeks in a barrel of monkeys," he said, "somebody, please, shoot me."
Skippy was wrong, there was something we could do to avoid jumping into star systems that had, permanently or frequently, an alien presence. From now on, I determined, the Flower would be jumping in first, to recon the place, before we jumped the Dutchman in and launched a landing party. According to Skippy, sending our captured Kristang frigate in was a waste of effort, that ship's sensors were so pitifully inadequate that it could barely find a planet. I disagreed, and figured he was exaggerating. When we were near the second target, we held the Dutchman at the edge of the star system, and Colonel Chang took the Flower in. He was gone a total of twelve hours, twelve hours that were nerve-wracking hours for me. The Flower jumped back exactly on time, and Chang excitedly reported what they had found, Or, rather, what they had not found.
In terms of finding Skippy's magical radio, the second of Skippy’s potential Elder sites was another disappointment. In terms of sparking the interest of Skippy and our science team, of the entire merry band of pirates, it was a big score. A home run. A touchdown. Or in soccer it would be a Goooooooal! The star, if you could call it that, was another dim red dwarf, a type of star I was getting jaded about already. There was no sign this star system had ever been visited by an intelligent species, other than the Elders. The place was so boring and ordinary, there was no reason for anyone to be here, unless they thought they'd find an Elder site, like we had. We found an Elder site, on a small airless moon orbiting a gas giant, right where Skippy thought it would be. From what we could tell, no one had found this site before us, no one had stripped it of valuables. The site had lain untouched for millions of years.
What was left of the site, anyway. What Skippy found intriguing, mostly because he didn't understand it, was that the center of the site had disappeared, been scooped out millions of years ago. Scooped out surgically. Where the center of the site used to be, where all the important Elder facilities were, was an almost perfect half circle, gouged out of the moon. Over the eons, the edges of the circle had crumbled somewhat, and the bowl had small craters scarring its bottom from later meteor impacts. Even to my unscientific eyes, something strange had happened here.
Skippy took an unusually long time processing the sensor data. "We should go down there anyway, I want to get samples," he finally said, after what for him must have been a lifetime of analysis. "There may be something useful in the outbuildings, I doubt it, but since we're here, we should check it out. Joe, I do not understand what happened here. Or, I do understand what happened here, I don't understand why. This is Elder technology, they created a spherical field, that moved everything inside that field into another spacetime. This is somewhat advanced technology, very energy-intensive, even for the Elders. Why they would have done this, to one of their own facilities, I have no idea. We need answers. I need answers."
This time, I went down to the moon in the dropship, and Chang remained aboard the Dutchman. With me were the French team, they had missed out, if you could call it that, on landing at the first Elder site. Giraud got the honor of first boot on the ground. I was right behind him, walking gingerly in the one-ninth gravity of the small moon, taking care with every step not to launch myself a hundred feet off the surface. Between the low gravity, and the boosted power of the armor suit, that would have been all too easy to do. The suits had settings for low gravity, preventing an unwary, foolish, inexperienced or merely stupid wearer from doing anything that might be fatal, those settings could be overridden in combat. Like all the other soldiers, I was eager to test a suit in simulated combat, especially in low gravity.
We poked around the site for a couple hours, looking into mostly empty structures, and didn't find anything useful. Naturally, I couldn't resist going right up to the edge of the perfect half sphere that had been scooped out of the moon. The lip of the sphere had crumbled somewhat over the eons, although in some places, where the sphere had cut through hard rock, the edge was still well defined. Standing there, listening to the gentle hissing of air in my stolen alien spacesuit, looking up at the vastness of star-spangled pitch black space above, then down at the chilling mystery of the half-sphere of moon that had been sent into another spacetime, I felt small. Small, insignificant, utterly unimportant to the cold universe. I felt, more than ever, that humans had no place out here, among the stars, so far from home. All our problems, our hopes, our dreams, our fears of being conquered, enslaved or wiped out by a technologically superior species, none of that meant anything to the ancient, unfeeling universe. With a shudder, I stepped back from the lip of the sphere, and turned to walk back to the dropship.
And I smiled. To my right, a group of French paratroopers were standing at the lip of the sphere, getting their pictures taken. After one or two serious poses appropriate for the significance of the site, they were showing off for the camera; doing handstands, forming a pyramid with one soldier on the shoulders of two others.
Screw the universe. The universe didn't care about us monkeys, it didn't need to. We could manage fine on our own, and even have a bit of fun doing it. We were going to be all right, if we had each other.
Relenting to pressure from the science team, who had mostly been stuck on the ship, I let a half dozen of them go down to the surface, accompanied by Indian paratroopers. When the scientists concluded with bitter disappointment, after several hours, that there was nothing of value or even interest at the site, they came back to the Dutchman. I ordered course set for the next target, and we jumped away.
The next day, I made the mistake of saying 'hello' to people as I came into the gym. All I wanted to do was run on the treadmill to warm up, before running down the ship's long spine. One of our SEALs took my greeting as an invitation to talk, and he hopped on the adjacent treadmill for what I quickly learned was an uncomfortable conversation.
Cutting short my warm-up, I wiped my face with a towel. "I will talk to Skippy about it," I assured him.
"I appreciate it, sir," he said, and sped up his treadmill as I walked out the door.
I ran a series of hard sprints, and thought about how to raise the subject while I cooled down on the walk back to the front of the ship. "Hey, Skippy," I called out to him once I was alone in my cabin.
"Hay is for horses."
"Very funny. I have a request. Some of the crew are not happy about you calling us monkeys, they, uh, it's hard to explain. It's a religious thing, they don't like the idea of humans evolving from monkeys."
"Oh, sure, no problemo, Joe."
Wow. His simple reply surprised me, I had expected a big argument from him. "Great, thank you, Skippy," I said with great relief. Damn, I wish everything was that easy.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," he said simply.
"What?"
"I didn't use that expression correctly?"
"Uh, depends what you meant," I said carefully. "That expression means you won't have to worry about, whatever it is, until it happens," I explained. "People are already unhappy, so we've crossed that bridge. You see?"
"Oh. I meant that I'll worry about it when you evolve beyond monkeys."
"What?"
"From my viewpoint, monkeys and humans are identical, so if any evolution went on, I ain't seeing it. You generally don't fling your poop at each other like monkeys do-"
"A point in our favor."
"Monkeys don't shoot each other. Advantage, monkeys."
"Crap. All right, can you do me a favor, and stop calling us monkeys anyway?"
"But monkey is such a funny word, Joe."
"Granted-"
"Monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey-"
"Stop it!"
"I can create a subroutine to say 'monkey' until the end of time, if you like. Monkey monkey monkey-"
"Shut up already!"
"We're done
talking, then?"
"That would be great, yeah." I should have known better. "We should do this less often."
"You brought it up."
"As you say, I am a dumb monkey."
"I'll remind you of that, the next time you ask me for something stupid. That shouldn't take long."
Rather than being alone in my office, I took my iPad to the galley for a cup of coffee. For me, not for the iPad. Desai was there, looking at something on her own tablet, she gestured me to sit with her. This was the first time we'd had some one on one time since, since I couldn't remember. Maybe ever. "Colonel, sit down, please."
"Captain, how are your trainees doing?"
She took a sip of tea before answering. "As well as can realistically be expected. Skippy is a tough instructor, he has no patience and his social skills are nonexistent."
"What? I am shocked." I grinned.
"Right," she smiled. "It was bad before, when the trainees were only learning the absolute basics of flying the ships in peacetime. Now we're into what Skippy calls Space Combat Maneuvers, and that is all new to me also. It's blowing my mind. I hate to say this, sir, but I may already be too old to learn flying all over again."
"Space Combat Maneuvers?" I had no idea what she was talking about.
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