She nodded silently, unconvinced. Sergeant Adams took that cue to usher her out of the bridge, and I went back to my dropship flight controls quiz. Or, I tried to. Talking about self-destructing the ship had put a damper on my mood also. Now I was really hoping there as something good left in the galley when my shift ended.
While the Dutchman hopped around the star system, I took the opportunity for real flight training, including my first solo flight in a dropship. Skippy announced he grudgingly, reluctantly, had to concede that it was possible, possible although extremely unlikely, that I might be able to fly an actual dropship away from the Dutchman, without immediately destroying both the dropship and the star carrier. For my first solo flight, he did request we first eject his escape pod out to a safe distance, a request I denied. The whole time I was flying, a simple loop around the Dutchman and back into the landing bay, he grumbled, second-guessed everything I did, and predicted doom for me and everyone aboard our starship.
On my own, I got the dropship lined up to re-enter the landing bay, and manually flew it in, using gentle, precise movements with the thrusters. While the Dutchman usually took control of dropships and guided them in, for pilot training we needed to learn how to handle the task manually. My first attempt to settle the dropship into the docking clamps missed by less than half a meter. Keep in mind, this smaller type of Thuranin dropship was still almost forty meters long, it wasn't like flying a little Cessna. Even the smallest dropship needs the capability to drop down through an atmosphere without burning up from heat, and the ability to lift itself, passengers and cargo all the way from the surface into orbit, and sometimes beyond. The incredibly advanced technology of the Thuranin couldn't shrink a dropship any smaller than a medium-size airliner on Earth. Flying in the vacuum and zero gravity of interstellar space, the dropship still had substantial mass, when it got moving in the wrong direction, it took a lot of force from thrusters to correct its course. One little adjustment from me, got the dot of light centered over the docking clamps in the cockpit display, and I pressed the button to engage the clamps. As the dropship was pulled down and secured, I announced "Dutchman, this is Barney, down and secured. Powering down now." Barney was my stupid pilot callsign, I wanted something cool like 'Rocketman', the problem with that notion was that traditionally, pilots do not get to choose their own callsigns. Your callsign is chosen for you by other pilots, and a request for anything too cool, like 'TopGun', is immediately shot down by your fellow pilots. 'Barney' was the least humiliating of my callsign options. I had to talk our pilot community out of calling me 'Buzzer', a name they wanted to give me, because of the number of times the cockpit warning buzzer had gone off while I was flying. Stupid buzzer, I suspected that Skippy made the damned thing go off at random just to mess with me.
Desai replied, "Barney, welcome back! Closing landing bay doors now."
"Roger, Dutchman, how did I do?"
Skippy answered before Desai could speak. "It is a miracle! Truly a freakin' miracle. Barney, the fact that we all survived you flying on your own, is compelling evidence of divine intervention."
"You did just fine, Colonel Bishop," Desai assured me. "Your first solo flight was a success; you are ready for the next phase of training. We'll find a nice asteroid or small moon for you to land one, somewhere."
"Great!" I safed the controls and unstrapped from the seat. "Desai, after I finish dropship training, I can start learning about systems aboard the Flower?"
"Yes, sir, it is not that diff-" she started to say.
"What? Joe is going to try flying a starship? Oh man, forget it," Skippy moaned. "The galaxy is doomed. Doomed! Look, you need to drop me off somewhere first, I'll put together a list of uninhabited planets."
We stayed there for nine days. It was nine days of excellent training for the crew, and the science team got to pour over the super-detailed sensor data that Skippy was collecting. Skippy confirmed the star system was, indeed, a perfect location for an Elder comm node. He confirmed there absolutely should be an Elder facility there. And he also confirmed there was no sign the Elders had ever been there. For several days, he was quiet, not making his usual snarky comments, not engaging me when I tried to provoke him, so I changed tactics and was extra nice to him. That may have helped, or maybe he perked up simply because we got to the next site and he had something to occupy himself.
The fifth star system we investigated was another disappointment. It was not a disappointment in terms of us not finding an Elder facility where Skippy predicted there should be one. It was not a disappointment in terms of the Elder site having been looted of all the valuable stuff long ago. It was a disappointment because the place was smashed to bits.
This site, unlike most of the sites we’d seen so far, was not on an airless moon orbiting a gas giant planet. This site was on a planet, about half the size of Earth, that had a thin atmosphere composed mostly of carbon dioxide. From what we could detect from orbit, it was lifeless, unless there were organisms in the soil.
The disappointment was caused by the fact that the Elder clearly had built a facility there, a large facility, and that the surface of the planet had been extensively bombarded by meteors. Skippy’s analysis determined that this star system used to have a normal asteroid field, and that somehow the orbits of the asteroids had been disrupted, to send rocks careening around the system. The two innermost planets, including the one with the Elder facility, had gotten pounded over millions of years, and the bombardment was still continuing.
“Is there anything left down there?” I asked hopefully. On the display, a map showed the original outlines of the Elder base, it had sprawled over two kilometers in diameter. Surely something that size could not have been completely wiped out of existence.”
“No,” Skippy sighed, “there’s a whole lot of nothin’ down there, Joe. A big meteor went splat practically right on top of the place, about three or four million years ago, and there are impacts in the area before and after the big rock fell. Any Elder artifacts that survived the big impact would have been thrown far away, there is a debris field extending three hundred kilometers from the impact site.”
“Three hundred kilometers?” I asked, astonished.
“Meteors can be big, Joe. This planet has been hit many times by objects larger than the one that hit the Yucatan on Earth and finished off the dinosaurs.”
“Damn. Are there any meteors, or asteroids or whatever, that will hit soon?”
“I haven’t completed a scan of the entire system yet; I can tell you there aren’t any objects larger than a basketball that will impact within the next month. Why? Are you thinking of going down there?”
“Yeah. We can scan the surface, right, and if we find any Elder stuff that’s still intact, we should go check it out. Also, our pilots should get experience flying dropships in an atmosphere. This could also be a good place for practicing ground assaults. As long as we’re here, we might as well take the opportunity.”
He sighed heavily. “Sure, why not?”
“Listen, Skippy, I know you’re disappointed, we all are. Again, your method of predicting the location of Elder sites has been pretty damned accurate so far, right? We’re on the trail, it’s only a matter of time now.”
The Dutchman stayed in orbit around the fifth site for seven days, when we conducted extensive training. The science team was given permission to go down to the surface also, after I made them go through an hour of begging and whining about it. Dr. Zheng, the biologist, was super excited to find microorganisms in the soil, Skippy declared they didn’t pose any threat to human biology, so I let her bring samples aboard the ship. Part of the training was for ground troops to test the portable shelters we’d constructed, Captain Smythe and his SAS team stayed overnight in shelters on the surface. They were scheduled to come back aboard in the morning, and I got up early to prepare a treat for them in the galley. "Crap! Damn it, I wanted to make cinnamon rolls to go with breakfast, but this worthless dough isn't rising." I
jiggled the bowl with the dough, as if that was going to help. The dough just sat there unhelpfully, looking stupid and uncooperative.
Adams peered over the counter at the dough. "Smells good."
"No," I had to admit, "that's the cinnamon sugar mix I was going to put in it." As a colonel, I should have been able to order the dough to rise. That hadn't worked. "Well, if this doesn't rise, maybe I can pass it off as cinnamon pita bread?"
Adams laughed. "I don't think you're going to fool anyone with that."
“It’s your fault, Joe,” Skippy said through a speaker. “You didn’t give the dough anything to feed on. You didn’t use the sugar, like you were supposed to.”
“There’s plenty of sugar here, Skippy,” I pointed to the plastic bowl next to the dough.
“I mean, you’re supposed to put some sugar in the dough, dumdum. The yeast eats the sugar, and create gas that causes the dough to rise. Did you even read the instructions?”
“Uh,” I said guiltily, “sort of.” I had seen ‘sugar’ in the recipe. Cinnamon rolls looked easy when my mother made them. “It’s doomed, then?”
“Could be. I’ve performed a chemical analysis; it is possible you could still rescue that awful mess. Put some plastic wrap over the top, cover it with a towel, and put it near that heat lamp to your left. Not under the heat lamp, just near it.”
“Thanks, Skippy.”
“No problem. I calculate a 62% chance of success. Next time, read the recipe, huh? I can’t do all of your thinking for you.”
Skippy saved the day, the dough rose somewhat, and people loved the cinnamon rolls. Sure, maybe they mostly liked the sweet icing I put on top.
After Smythe’s team came back aboard, we retrieved the dropships, and jumped away to check out the sixth potential site. The crew was exhausted from the grueling training we’d conducted, it was good that it was going to take us two weeks to get to the next target, people needed rest and equipment needed maintenance. Skippy’s mood could have used some improvement also.
Three days of stand-down rest left the crew refreshed, and we went back to a normal schedule. After the excitement of training on a planet, the crew and the science team were all eagerly anticipating what we would find next. I tried to temper their enthusiasm, what we didn’t need was another disappointment sinking morale. We needed diversions aboard the ship, I made plans to meet Major Simms at dinner, to talk about what sort of fun we could have, with the supplies she’d brought on board. The British team was cooking that day, it was something they called ‘Sunday Roast dinner,’ and it smelled delicious when I walked in the galley.
Then I looked at it. There was some sort of green, wrinkly, stiff vegetable-looking thing on the side of my plate. Next to the roast chicken and Yorkshire pudding and the carrots and the scalloped potatoes, it was out of place, like someone had crumpled up a green napkin and left it there. Simms was sitting to my left, I whispered to her, keeping quiet to avoid insulting the British team. "Major, what is this?"
"You ever been to a salad bar at a restaurant?" She asked quietly. "The salad stuff is in bowls, the bowls are on top of a bed of ice, and in between is this stuff."
A light bulb when on in my head. "Oh, yeah, I've seen this stuff." With a fork, I poked at it. "I thought that was plastic decoration, it was supposed to be lettuce or something. That stuff is real? It's supposed to be food?"
"It is food, it's kale. It's good. Look, it's not limp like lettuce."
She was right, it moved under my fork like it was crisp. "Kale, yeah, I’ve heard of it. They deep-fried it?"
"I don't know how they prepared it," now she poked it with a fork suspiciously.
"You know what would make it better?" I stabbed the kale with a fork and sniffed at it. "If you did deep-fry it, but replaced the kale with a Snickers bar."
"Or a Twinkie," Taylor said. "You ever try a deep-fried Twinkie? They have them at the state fair in Tennessee."
"A deep-fried Twinkie. Unbelievable." Skippy said from the speaker in the ceiling. "This is proof there is a God."
"Huh?" I asked. "How do you figure that?"
"Because this clearly shows you monkeys are so freakin' stupid, there's no way you could have survived until now, without divine intervention helping you."
"Amazing," I took a bite of the kale, if that's what it was. It wasn't bad. "Whatever this is, apparently it's a religious experience for Skippy."
"I didn't say, oh, forget it." People laughed. Not at me this time, at Skippy. "Shut up, all of you."
"Wow, that was a snappy comeback. Bye, Skippy," I said, "pleasant dreams." I could get to like kale. If that's what it was.
A thought occurred to me, while sitting in my office, three days before we were scheduled to arrive at the next target. It was not a pleasant thought. I pulled up a schematic of the ship on my iPad, then an external view we'd taken from one of the Thuranin dropships. "Skippy, how many star carriers like the Dutchman do the Thuranin have?"
"If you mean this particular type or class of ship, they have hundreds. It is a common design they have used for almost four hundred years, with little change." He snorted. "Little change, because in the last four hundred years, the Thuranin haven't managed to steal enough higher technology to improve their piece of junk starships. Or they stole it, and can't figure out how it works. Stupid little green pinheads."
"They have hundreds exactly like the Dutchman? No little differences?" I knew the United States Navy had 'standard' ship designs like the Arleigh Burke destroyers, but among those ships were subclasses that an experienced sailor could identify at a glance.
"Oh. Yeah, sure, there are subtle differences, as ships are overhauled or upgraded over the years. There are, or were, about seventy ships almost identical to our Flying Dutchman. Why? Were you hoping our pirate ship is something special? A collector's item or something?"
"The opposite, Skippy, I'm hoping there is nothing unique about the Dutchman that can be easily identified. If someone gets close enough for a good look at us, or our stealth field fails, I don't want the Thuranin realizing this is the same ship that disappeared near Paradise, where there are humans, and the wormhole near the human home world mysteriously shut down around the same time this ship disappeared. That might make a suspicious Thuranin ask too many questions."
"I see your point, and it is a good one, Joe. The Thuranin tend to be rather paranoid about security."
"Not paranoid enough, they didn't count on Skippy the Magnificent."
"True, I am magnificent. And, if you were being sincere for a change, thank you."
"Sincere. I give you props when you've earned it, Skippy. All right, have the Thuranin lost a star carrier just like this one? Lost, like, they didn't see it get destroyed in battle, all they know is it went missing somewhere."
"Hmmm, that's a tough one, I need to search the Thuranin database. Uh, no, unfortunately, no ship exactly like this configuration is missing, other than the Dutchman."
"Crap."
"However," Skippy added with a touch of a smirk to his voice, "a star carrier very similar to the Dutchman did disappear mysteriously in this sector seventeen years ago. At the time, it was fully loaded with heavy Kristang warships. The Thuranin found debris from several of that star carrier's escort ships, but never any sign of the star carrier itself, or of even a single one of the Kristang ships. At the time, the Thuranin accused the Kristang of having stolen their star carrier, while the Kristang accused their patrons of destroying an entire Kristang heavy battlegroup. According to the databanks I downloaded from both the Thuranin and Kristang, neither side admits to knowing what happened."
"Or they do know, and they're not stupid enough to put it in a database aboard a ship."
"True, although in this case, I suspect the Thuranin truly do not know what happened to that ship. I suspect nefarious action by the Kristang, they would gladly throw away a battlegroup of their own crappy ships, in order to capture a Thuranin starship with an advanced jump drive. That missing sh
ip is close enough to the Dutchman, especially with modifications that would have inevitably been made in the past seventeen years, that we could easily pass for that ship. The Thuranin identify their ships by quantum fluctuations embedded in the jump drive fields, each ship is unique. I could adjust our drive coils to mimic the missing ship's signature."
I gave a big thumb's up, knowing Skippy could see that. "That would be excellent. Not only do we avoid the Thuranin suspecting humans stole their ship, we may sow distrust between the Thuranin and the Kristang."
Skippy laughed. "Oh, boo hoo. Gosh, it would be just awful for the lizards and little green men to get any more hateful of each other."
"Yeah, keep in mind, we'd rather no one gets a good look at the Dutchman, you keep using your magic to make people out there think we're a Jeraptha ship."
"Understood. Hey, between us, we came up with a good idea. Mostly me, of course."
As a monkey, I wasn't going to argue with him. "Of course."
CHAPTER TWELVE
Our investigation of the sixth potential site for an Elder base started well enough. To get there from the fifth site, we didn't need Skippy to wake up a dormant wormhole, or create a new connection for an active wormhole. We only needed to make normal transits through two regular, established wormholes, and then jump for about five days to another star system that was nothing special. This star system was not centered on yet another boring red dwarf star, this one was a yellow dwarf star, which I assumed meant it was small. It was upsetting to learn from Skippy, and our science team, that our own home star, The Sun, was itself classified a yellow dwarf. That didn't seem right to me. I remember being in school, I think it was the third grade, seeing a model of our solar system, where the Earth was the size of a ping pong ball, and the Sun was a basketball. And I remember my teacher Ms. Carmichael, who I had a huge crush on and still do, telling us that if the model was to scale, the Sun would be over a million times the size of the Earth! That blew my little third-grade mind. To our astrophysics team, however, our Sun was nothing special in the galaxy, a fact they assured me was very good for humanity, because it meant our Sun provided an environment for life to flourish, while the Sun was still young enough to be burning hydrogen instead of helium. Or something like that, I still felt they were dissing our home star. When I hear 'burning hydrogen', I think of the Hindenburg. That's not good.
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