SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2)

by Craig Alanson

  "Engage jump countdown," Simms ordered.

  "This is exciting," Skippy said. "To Bed, Bath, and Beyond!"

  Simms and I shared a glance. "I think you mean 'to infinity and beyond', Skippy." I said.

  "No, I figured we'd start with something small. Infinity is too ambitious for monkeys."

  I didn't respond, as the jump countdown timer on the display read 3,2,1-

  And we jumped. From one empty region of interstellar space to another.

  "Jump successful," Desai reported. "Calculating position now."

  "Ahhhhh, you'll take forever, I can't stand the suspense. We emerged within fifty thousand kilometers of the target." Skippy announced cheerily, our goal for this second jump was to be within one hundred thousand kilometers. "Good monkeys! Great job! Bananas for everyone!"

  "Skippy!" I admonished him. "Be nice for a change."

  "What? Monkeys love bananas."

  I did like bananas, couldn't argue with him there.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The actual final jump was programmed by Skippy, it took us just outside the target star system, which had a rather common and uninteresting red dwarf star, with three planets, a rocky inner planet and two gas giants. None of the planets were anything special. What Skippy found interesting is there were signs the red dwarf star used to be a class K star, which is a larger orange star. How it went from a class K to a red dwarf, Skippy thought, might have involved manipulation by the Elders, he said sometimes when the Elders needed a lot of energy for a project, they would extract it from an unimportant star that nobody needed. So, Skippy thought the Elders might have had a research facility, or monitoring station there. And, back when the Elders still inhabited the galaxy in physical form, something about force lines, or some damned thing he'd tried to explain that I hadn't understood and even had our scientists scratching their heads, meant this star system would have been an especially good place to locate a communications node. That was why we were checking out a star system that was so boringly ordinary, around three quarters of all the stars in the galaxy were red dwarfs.

  Colonel Chang's voice came over the bridge speakers. "Dutchman, this is the Flower, we are ready for jump."

  "Roger, Flower, good luck, and be careful. Especially the careful part.” The little frigate would be jumping into the star system to recon the place, without putting the Flying Dutchman at risk.

  "Understood, we will take all precautions." Skippy had preloaded the Flower's navigation system with multiple jump options in case of trouble. "Be back as soon as we can."

  On the display, the Flower disappeared in a brief flash of gamma rays. Chang had taken her out, with Desai as the chief pilot. Desai is the only person who had flown that ship, and if they got into trouble, I wanted Chang to have our most experienced pilot with him. The Dutchman would be fine without Desai, we were in deep space, with plenty of pilots, and Skippy aboard if anything went wrong. The mission was simple, it should be safe: jump in near the second planet, because Skippy thought the most likely place the Elders would have had a base is on a moon circling the second planet. Jump in, first scan for ships. Then scan for artificial activity anywhere near the planet. If ships, or any signs of hostile intelligent life are detected, jump away immediately, jump back to the Dutchman, and we both get the hell out of there. If nothing dangerous is detected, scan the moons for signs of any sort of Elder facility. Skippy thought we'd have much better luck finding signs of an Elder base, using the more sophisticated sensors aboard the Flying Dutchman, the Flower would only be looking for anything obvious.

  It should be easy; it should be safe. It worried the hell out of me. Our partly beat-up, second-hand, stolen Kristang frigate, relying on technology the lizards had stolen from higher-tech species and didn't quite understand, was out there all alone, without Skippy to guide them. Detaching the frigate to recon the target had been Chang's idea, we had discussed it at length, me arguing against it, until I had to give up and concede that Chang was absolutely right. Risking the Flower was preferable to risking the Dutchman. Aboard the frigate was a nuke, for Chang to use for destroying his ship, if it was at risk of being captured. Our nukes were each encased in a jacket of contaminants that, according to Skippy and our scientists, would conceal the human origin of the devices. Apparently, the chemical or atomic makeup of a nuclear device was like a fingerprint, it would point right back to who made it, when, even the particular facility that generated the material. All of that was news to me, I thought a nuke was a nuke.

  Thinking about the Flower self-destructing was not helping my anxiety as time dragged on. "Hey, Skippy, you said one of the planets here is rocky? That means it has a solid surface, right, it doesn't mean it has to be a lifeless rock like Mercury?"

  "Correct. 'Rocky' also does not mean it can beat up other planets in a fight."

  "Wow, look at you, showing off your pop culture knowledge."

  "The other two planets here are like Neptune in your home solar system, they are smallish gas giants. No large rings around either of them."

  How could something 'giant' also be described as 'smallish'? I let it slide, because that is something Skippy could easily spend half an hour arguing about. "The rocky one, is it livable?"

  "Uh, that would be resounding no, Joe. True, it is at a distance from the star where surface temperature might be considered habitable for carbon and water based life forms, a distance your species calls the 'Goldilocks zone'. Not too hot, not too cold. That's a good description, by the way, I'm going to keep using it. Huh, something useful from monkeys, who'd have thunk it, huh? Although, when you think about it, Goldilocks was a bit of a dimwitted bee-atch. Who falls asleep in a house owned by bears? Why would they need to eat bland porridge, when they could eat her for dinner? The story illustrates a good point, but it makes no sense at all. Now, there are human fairy tales I find sensible, although they are, of course, all somewhat fanciful, being-"

  "Skippy?"

  "Yeah?"

  "This rocky planet? It's not livable?"

  "I was getting to that. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Livable planets around red dwarf stars are exceedingly rare in this galaxy. Because red dwarf stars emit very low energy, a planet has to be so close to the star to be warm enough for supporting life, that its surface becomes tidally locked. That means like your moon, one side always faces the object it is orbiting. One side of the planet is warm, but the other side is frozen solid, so cold that any atmosphere might freeze and fall to the surface as snow. And red dwarves are highly variable, the amount of light they emit can dim substantially for lengthy periods, other times they can throw out large solar flares, strong enough to burn off the atmosphere of any rocky planet, over time."

  "Got it. I will scratch red dwarves off any future house hunting trips."

  "A wise choice. Hey, talking about dwarves reminds me of a fairy tale-"

  I let him ramble on, it kept him busy, and helped me pass the time while waiting for the Flower to return.

  Return it did, exactly on time. We had allotted forty minutes for the mission, jump out to return jump, if it had been late we were jumping the Dutchman in close enough to find out what happened, it the Flower had returned early, we'd assume she had hostile ships on her tail. Neither happened. "Dutchman, this is the Flower," Chang said, "success, we found an artificial structure on one of the moons, right where Mr. Skippy thought it would be."

  "Told you so," Skippy said smugly.

  For a change, I ignored the arrogant little beer can. "That's good news, Flower. Transfer navigation control to Skippy, so we can take you aboard ASAP."

  "Roger that, Dutchman."

  CHAPTER 6 ELDER SITES ARE DRY HOLES

  After the first three sites where Skippy thought we might find unmapped Elder sites, we set course for the fourth potential site, a journey that was going to take almost five weeks, because we had to go through three wormholes that weren’t easily connected to each other. After the disappointment of not finding a comm node at three s
ites already, I was very much not looking forward to five weeks of boredom. The science team was happy, busy, enthralled by pouring over the mountain of data we had collected already. Skippy was in a bad mood, not his usual jovial self, he was pissed off by our failures to find a magical radio, and frustrated and puzzled by not understanding why the last site had been replaced by a perfectly scooped-out hole. The people who were bored were the pilots and the SpecOps teams. For the pilots, the next five weeks would be no more interesting than a shuttle run from DC to New York and back. Other than us trying to program a couple jumps each week, the only thing the pilots had to look forward to was combat simulations, and simulating landings with our Thuranin dropships. The SpecOps teams had nothing to do, other than training over and over. Considering that I’d made it perfectly clear I wished to avoid combat, the highlight of the next month for the special forces was a cooking contest. I seriously needed to do something about morale. Maybe a basketball tournament, one of the few sports we could play in our small gym.

  Exercising in the gym helped keep my sanity, I was on my way there one morning, when I stopped in the middle of the corridor. "Oh, damn it."

  "What is it, Joe?" Skippy asked. "I'm monitoring all ship functions, and everything is operating nominally at the moment."

  "No, it's, it's nothing. I forgot something, that's all."

  "Damn it, did you forget to pick up your mother at the airport before we left Earth? I'm sure she's gotten a ride by now. Or she walked home. Kind of too late now."

  "No, Skippy, I did not forget her at the airport."

  "This time."

  "Oh for- that was one freakin' time!"

  "Pretty impressive there, Joe. Most people go their whole lives without leaving a close relative stuck at an airport for five hours, you did that when you were only seventeen. You were a precocious disappointment."

  "That happened one freakin' time, and I'll never hear the end of it. It was Amanda's fault, anyway, if she hadn't distracted me-"

  "Thinking with the wrong head, huh?"

  "Skippy, I was a young, stupid kid back then."

  "Huh. You're under the illusion that you are different now?"

  "Yeah. I'm not as young. Anyway, I inherited that forgetfulness. When I was seven years old, my father took me to a Red Sox game at Fenway park, after the game he used the bathroom while I went to go buy a T shirt, and he forgot about me. He was across the Maine state line before he realized I wasn't in the car."

  "Huh. This story I haven't heard. What happened?"

  Standing in the corridor aboard the Flying Dutchman, I could remember that day like it was yesterday. "I waited on Boyleston Street, anybody who saw me probably figured my old man was drinking in a bar and told me to stand outside. I remember a peanut vendor gave me a free bag of peanuts, he must have felt sorry for me. Anyway, after a couple hours, it's really dark and it's getting chilly, this was in early June, my father's car pulls up, and all he says is 'there you are'. I got in, and we drove to my uncle's place in Brunswick for the night."

  "That's a good story. How come I didn't hear that before?"

  "How did you hear about me forgetting my mother at the Bangor airport?"

  "Your mother talked about it to her sister, while you were home, right before we went up to the Dutchman. I was listening to everyone at that party."

  "That was a good party," I said sadly, thinking back to the last day I was on Earth.

  Maybe a hundred people had stopped by my parents' house that afternoon, excited to see someone who had returned from the stars. They all wanted to see 'Barney' Bishop, and I didn't mind people in my hometown calling me that. To keep things as low-key as possible, our Thuranin dropship had landed in the road right in front of my parents' house. I had called my parents from Paris, saying that I would be dropping by for a short visit, staying over only one night. Sergeant Kendall and two people of her Air Force security team accompanied me, I slept that night on a couch in my parents' house, while the security people overnighted in the back of a National Guard truck in the driveway. Skippy by that time was already back aboard the Dutchman, getting the ship ready for departure, and remotely flying dropships to bring supplies up into orbit.

  To say that I slept on the couch was an exaggeration, I only managed maybe three hours of shut-eye that night. There had been too many people who wanted to meet me, talk with me, and too many questions. Questions about what I had been doing, what was going on with UNEF on Paradise, and what lay in Earth's future. The Kristang no longer had Earth under their iron grip, but people knew there were plenty more Kristang in the galaxy, and a Thuranin ship hung in low orbit, and the Ruhar were still out there also.

  To answer all those questions, I had a lame cover story that UNEF, and the US government, wanted me to stick closely to. Before I left Paris, I'd been forced to endure a four-hour briefing, including a mock question and answer session. By the time I was done, my head was spinning so much that I had a hard time remembering which was the cover story, and which was the truth. The cover story was that I and a few other UNEF soldiers were brought back to Earth on a Thuranin star carrier, for some mission that I couldn't talk about. When we got here, the Thuranin learned the Kristang had been abusing an ally, so the Thuranin took appropriate action, and wiped the Kristang out. Me being on Earth was a quick visit, I needed to get back aboard the Thuranin ship to continue our voyage to wherever we were going, which was top secret. The UN Expeditionary Force on Paradise was doing great, communications between Paradise and Earth were spotty because of enemy activity, but there was nothing to worry about. Everything was wonderful, Earth was safe, and every morning people would wake up to sunshine and birds signing. Or some BS like that, I tried to stick to the script as much as possible, with Sergeant Kendall watching me like a hawk. For her sake, I was on my best behavior, because while I would be leaving Earth, she would be stuck behind with the consequences.

  Either I sucked at lying, or my parents simply knew me too well, my story didn't convince them. They knew not to ask too many questions; I could see it in their eyes. The next morning, my mother left the table at breakfast because she was crying so much. My father took me out in the field behind the house, supposedly to show me how he'd modified the tractor to run on home-brew wood alcohol. "Son," he said, with his head half under the engine cover, "I don't know what the real situation is, and I'm not going to ask you to tell me. You're wearing sergeant's stripes now, and I heard one of those Air Force security people call you 'Colonel' last night. Whatever is going on, know that your mother and I are damned proud of you. I have only one question I'd like you to answer." He pulled his head out of the engine cover and looked me straight in the eye, with a glance over at Sergeant Kendall, who was standing a discrete distance away. "Are we safe now from those damned lizards? And the hamsters, and whoever else is out there?"

  "Yes, Dad. I can't tell you why, or how."

  "Good," he breathed a sigh of relief.

  "Good." I said, not knowing what else to say. Sergeant Kendall cleared her throat meaningfully, with a look at the dropship. It was time to go. "You did a good job on the tractor there."

  "Ayuh. We're getting gas supplies again, it's rationed, of course. And electricity, you saw that."

  "Yeah. Looks good." My parents' house had lights all night again, things were getting back to normal on Earth. That was worth fighting for. "Dad, I have to go."

  "Ayuh, I suppose you do." He stuck out his hand awkwardly, his jaw set. That's the way it had always been in our family, we didn't talk about things. "Good visit, thanks for coming home."

  I had been through too much to go for that bullshit again. Not this time. Not again. I took my father's hand, then pulled him in for a back-thumping hug. And I cried. And he cried too.

  "Ah, shit on a shingle," he said after we separated, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his flannel sleeve. "You'll let us know what you're doing, when you can?

  "Sure thing, Dad. You can count on it."

  "
So what did you forget?" Skippy asked, bringing me back to the present.

  "What?" I was still thinking of my last day on Earth.

  "Damn, you are forgetful," Skippy scoffed. "You stopped in the middle of the corridor, because you said your forgot something."

  "Oh, I forgot my weightlifting gloves, that's all."

  That night, or actually early the next morning, I awoke with a sudden jerk. Not the kind of thing where, when you're falling asleep and your leg jerks by itself. I hate that. This was me soundly asleep, having a dream, when my subconscious rudely pulled me out of it. For a moment, I froze in shock, wondering if something had happened to the ship. No. No alarms, no beeping from my zPhone, no Skippy shouting at me through the speaker in the ceiling. It wasn’t the curry I had for dinner the previous night either, that was delicious.

  Then it hit me. An idea. I had thought of an idea while I was sleeping. I rolled out of bed and began pulling pants and a shirt on, after glancing at my iPad for the uniform of the day. Damn. It was 0337 in the morning, ship time. Sometimes I wish my stupid brain would just let me sleep. "Hey, Skippy, you awake?"

  "Always. That must have been quite a dream, you woke up fast."

  Whatever I'd been dreaming about, it was gone now. "Yeah. Hey, that map you showed us, of why it's going to take us five weeks to get to the next potential Elder site, can you show me that again on my iPad?"

  "Done. Why? You checking my math in the middle of the night?"

  "Like that's ever going to happen. No, I'm checking your logic."

  Skippy snorted. "Wow, you sure you're not still dreaming? Me? A flaw in my logic?"

  "Not a flaw, a gap." I looked at the map. On the 2D surface of an iPad display, it wasn't as impressive, or easy to understand, as on the 3D displays of the ship's bridge. There was no sense of depth. When Skippy first showed us star maps, I thought the 3D effect was nice but not necessary, because the Milky Way galaxy is a disc, so not seeing the thickness of the disc didn't matter much. I was wrong. At any scale other than looking at the entire galaxy from far, far way, it sure does matter, because the arms of the Milky Way's disc are thousands of lightyears thick, top to bottom. The Dutchman's current position was in the Orion Spur, about six hundred lightyears from the Gum Nebula. Yeah, that kind of description didn't used to mean much to me either, back when stars were something I only saw from Earth's surface. I touched the iPad display and zoomed in the view with my fingertips. Wormholes now appeared, scattered here and there at random, the wormholes showing as blinking purple lights. I touched a wormhole symbol, and a dotted purple line appeared, showing which other wormhole it connected to. Skippy had a way, on the main bridge display, of showing all wormhole connections in the local area, I didn't need that at the moment. Some wormholes connected to a wormhole only a dozen or so lightyears away, a few connected points thousands of lightyears apart. The furthest Skippy knew of, was a wormhole that connected to a wormhole seven thousand lightyears from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a distance of fifty five thousand lightyears from its origin wormhole in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way. Why that particular wormhole ended thousands of lightyears from the closest star, no one knew. The average was around six hundred lightyears, no one knew why one wormhole connected to another, for most wormhole connections went past wormholes they should, logically, connect to. Even Skippy didn't know, and not knowing frustrated the hell out of him. The arrangement of wormholes in the galaxy made no sense, that was an affront to Skippy's sense of how the Elders would have left things. And that left him wondering whether some unknown force had screwed with the Elders' stuff, after they left. Or, worse, if what he thought he remembered about the Elders wasn't complete. Or true.