Or on a dusty shelf in a warehouse. "Skippy, I see this is a great opportunity, I truly do. We're a long way from the Kristang, we don't have any transport, and they have air power. We can't just knock on their door and ask for the AI, we'll have to fight for it. And in a fight, we'll have to kill all of them, every single one of them, so survivors can't tell their ship they were attacked by humans. Huh. Also, if we do kill them all, that ship is going to be asking a lot of questions when it arrives. You need to let me think on this."
"You're the military genius, Joe, you'll think of something."
"Genius?"
"Relatively speaking, of course. On a monkey scale. Hey, you need to think fast, we don't have a lot of time."
“I’ll get right on it,” I said quietly, stepping out from my private cubbyhole and into the main chamber of the cavern, where rows of cots contained sleeping people. Then I stopped suddenly, struck by a thought. A frightening thought. “You said you think this Elder ship, with the AI, crashed between 2.3 and 2.5 million years ago?”
“Yeah, why?”
“An Elder starship, with an Elder AI, crashed only a couple hundred thousand years after Elder technology pushed this planet out of orbit?”
“The coincidental timing has not escaped my notice, yes. I find this highly suspicious.”
“Maybe this AI knows what happened,” I said, and as I spoke, a chill ran up my spine. “Oh, shit. Could this AI have been involved?”
“No! Categorically, no. Not possible. That is not possible. No sentient being connected to Elder civilization, whether biological or artificial in origin, would have, could have, done something this evil. It is more likely the Elder ship and this planet fell victim to the same sinister forces. Joe, this scares the shit out of me, so to speak.”
After considering Skippy’s news about the Kristang ship arriving early, and his suggestion that we raid the scavenger camp for the comm node and AI, I called the entire SpecOps team together in the man cavern. When everyone had assembled, I stood on a table and announced "People, we've made the most of our opportunity to land on this planet, train here, and learn about the planet. Now, I am excited to announce that we have a bonus opportunity."
There were groans from the SpecOps teams from all five countries. No matter what the nationality, everyone understood what 'opportunity' means in the military. Garcia raised his hand to get my attention. "Sir, in this case, is 'Bone Us' one word, or two?"
I joined in the laughter. It was a good sign, that the people under my command felt confident they could joke around with me. We had bonded as a team during our exile on Newark; the hard-core elite SpecOps people, and their sergeant-pretending-to-be-a-colonel commander. “It could be both, Garcia. Here’s the situation; Skippy had discovered that the Kristang scavenger team here has not only found a comm node in the wreckage of an Elder starship, they found another AI. Another beer can like Skippy. Or, I should say,” I hastened to add before Skippy became offended, “another Elder AI, since I think we can all agree there is no one like Skippy. Hopefully.” That remark got a chuckle. “It is my intention for us to raid the Kristang, and take the two items we need.”
There was no chuckling, people gasped. Smythe spoke first. "Sir," he asked, "the point of us hiding in caves, and ghosting their satellites, is so the Kristang won't know we're here at all. Now we're talking about attacking them, risking an attack on an enemy with at least equivalent weapons, and the advantage of air power? Good as we are," he looked around at his fellow SpecOps troops, all of whom were supremely confident they were the best, "these Kristang are bigger, faster and tougher than any of us. I understand our friend Skippy is eager to get this AI, but how is this worth the risk to us?"
"It is worth the risk, because if this new AI can tell Skippy how to contact the Collective, or the Elder comm node works, we don't need to go wandering around the galaxy again. And, remember, the Kristang here also have an Elder communications node, the very thing we came all the way out here to find. Getting that AI could be a huge bonus, but getting a comm node will mean our mission will be complete. Also, I'm hoping this new AI, or Skippy or both of them, will agree to guide the Dutchman back to Earth, before they, you know, beam up or whatever it is Skippy hopes to do. In that case, we will not only return home instead of being stuck out here forever, we will also be providing humanity with a Thuranin star carrier, that can be examined, taken apart, and possibly reverse engineered. That is an opportunity I think we cannot miss."
That hit home. People nodded, looking at each other. A star carrier, permanently in Earth orbit. A technology far beyond even the Kristang. The basis, perhaps, of humanity building a defensive capability, a starship, even a fleet of our own someday.
"We're only going," I added, "if we have a plan to minimize the risk. Unfortunately, I haven’t told you the best part yet. Skippy has also learned that a ship will be arriving here to retrieve the Kristang, in sixty to eighty days.” People gasped. “Yeah, I know, the Flying Dutchman will not be ready in sixty days, so we won’t have the ship’s weapons, or dropships, available for an attack. We will have to walk all the way there, and attack with the equipment we have available. Frankly, if I didn’t have a special forces unit available, I wouldn’t even consider attacking the Kristang. Again, we are not going, unless we have a very solid plan to minimize our risk. If we can’t do that, then what we do is hunker down here, remain inside the caverns, until that Kristang ship goes away.”
“An attack, against a species with equivalent technology, on their ground, and we can only bring with us what we’re able to carry on our backs?” Smythe mused aloud. I couldn’t tell whether he was skeptical or intrigued.
“The motto of the SAS is ‘Who dares wins’, Captain Smythe?” I asked
“This,” Williams said quietly, “needs to be one hell of a plan, sir.”
“Agreed,” I said, “and for that, I am grateful that I have six experienced special operations leaders. And, our ace in the hole. Don’t forget about Skippy. He may be all the way on the other side of this star system, but right now, he is already controlling everything the Kristang see through their satellites. It is a long walk to the Kristang base, one thing we will not have to worry about is being detected on satellite images. I am counting on Skippy giving us the advantage of surprise. We’re going to hit them by surprise, hit them hard, and they won’t even know there is anyone else on this planet until our bullets start exploding.”
When I dismissed people from the meeting, to begin thinking up ideas on how to attack the Kristang, I walked over to Chang. “Colonel, we now need a single leader of the SpecOps teams. I want you to put together a list of-”
“Captain Smythe,” Chang interrupted me.
“Smythe?”
“Smythe. And if you ask the other five team leaders, they will tell you the same. Smythe has everyone’s respect, everyone likes him, and he has by far the most experience commanding special operations in combat. He was up to be promoted to major, but he turned it down, because UNEF wanted the team leaders all to be captains, so they would be equal in rank.”
“Huh. I didn’t know that.”
“It’s in his personnel file, sir,” Chang chided me gently.
“Smythe, then?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve put some thought into this, ahead of time,” I observed.
“I am the executive officer, I wouldn’t be much use if I didn’t keep you out of trouble, sir.”
Before we could attack the scavenger base and take the AI and comm node, we needed a plan. The SpecOps leaders began looking at maps and gathering data as soon as I dismissed people from the meeting. What I did was call Skippy. Before we made elaborate plans, I wanted to try something very simple and easy. "Hey, Skippy, I've got a question for you."
"What?"
"You said even a nuke wouldn't damage you, right?"
"True."
"Great-"
"True, both that I said it, and that a nuke can't harm me. To be
clear. Since I'm talking to a monkey."
"Uh-huh. Same with this other AI?"
"Possibly. I don't know for certain, it depends on the strength of its connection to the local spacetime. If that connection is weak, an explosion could damage it."
"Crap."
"Why did you ask?"
"Because," I said, mentally crossing one idea off my list, "I was hoping you could hit the Kristang base with a couple missiles, then all we would need to do is sort through the debris to find this beer can, I mean, AI." The Thuranin missiles aboard the Dutchman weren't tipped with nuclear warheads, they used some fancy high-tech molecular compression device that had a high explosive yield without radiation.
"Ah ha. Unfortunately, there are four problems with your idea. First, even one of our missiles might damage the AI, and we can't risk that in any way. Second, I would be launching the missiles at very long range, which would make it almost impossible to time their impact when all the Kristang are at their base. Third, a missile will certainly damage the comm node, which is almost as important as the AI. Elder communications nodes are rather fragile devices, for reasons I had best not explain to monkeys. And fourth, perhaps most important, we currently don't have any missiles aboard the Flying Dutchman."
"What?" I asked, surprised. "We had eight-"
"Dumdum, you forget I used one to carry the microwormhole to Newark."
"Fine, seven. We had seven missiles!"
"You are entirely, one hundred percent accurate. We had seven missiles. To repair the Dutchman, I had to disassemble them for raw materials and fuel."
"Well, that's just freakin' great,” I fumed. “When were you going to mention that? What the hell is the point of me being a commander if I didn't know what is going on with my own ship?”
"I'm building a starship from moon dust here, you want every detail? We also no longer have a galley or a gym, those parts of the ship are currently being used as a crude particle accelerator, to transmute rare elements I need."
"A warship, that now does not have any missiles, is kind of an important fact I need to know, Skippy. Although we're going to need a galley eventually."
"Damn, Joe, what is so important about a freakin' galley anyway?"
"Skippy, we have a crew of people who, whether they think about it consciously or not, in the back of their minds they know we're never going home. You said it, after you contact the Collective, you'll be gone, and it's very unlikely we can fly the ship all the way back to Earth by ourselves. Food, good food, prepared by people we know, served hot, in a place we can gather and enjoy it together, that's important. That is vital to morale, Skippy. We need it. It is one of the few comforts we have out here, no matter how bad the situation is, if we can look forward to eating something good, that gives us hope. It's a meatsack thing, you understand it? A galley is important, we need it."
"Also," Skippy chuckled, "your galley does provide me with endless opportunities for amusement. Ok, by the time you get back aboard, we will have a galley, at least part of a gym, and three, maybe four missiles. As the reactors come back online, and I process raw materials into useable substances, I will be able to divert resources to habitation needs and weapons. My projection is that we will have enough materials and energy, to assemble up to eleven missiles total. Not all these new missiles will have fully capability, we simply don't have the resources for that type of manufacturing."
"Skippy, I do appreciate the enormous amount of work you're doing." At my parents' house, weekend projects were carefully planned, because a round trip to a decent hardware store or lumber yard, took over two and a half hours. Skippy's hardware store was whatever tools he could make by himself.
"Remember that when you get back here, and parts of the ship are still off-limits to be decontaminated from high-energy radiation."
"I'm sure we will simply love what you've done with the place."
"It will truly be magical, I'm going with an arts and crafts style theme, with a blending of elements from Disney and French bordello. Blowing up the scavenger base with a missile won't work, what is your backup plan?"
"That was the backup plan, Skippy. The original plan is we raid the scavengers' base. I'm working on that."
The reason we were still working on plans for the raid was, we didn't have a workable plan. The best plan would be for our special forces to attack the scavengers' base at night, wearing powered armor. Speed, power, surprise, that plan had all the advantages. We would need to sneak up to their base, take cover, and wait until their aircraft was safely down and secured. Thanks to Skippy, we could track their aircraft, and we had a complete layout of their base. Thanks to the fact that the scavenger leaders didn't trust their forced labor, and therefore had the base covered with surveillance, Skippy tapped into their systems and could see almost everything inside their base. There was a very basic problem with that plan; our armored suits didn't store enough power to walk all the way to the scavenger base. The stupid Kristang hadn't built their suits with removable powercells, so we couldn't bring along enough energy to have a person in a suit carry an empty suit and leapfrog to get there. In regular use, powered suits were supposed to be supported by portable recharging units, and we didn't have even a single one of those with us. However we got there, we wouldn't have armored suits for the assault. As good as our special forces were, they wouldn't be so special matched up against Kristang. We would be facing over thirty larger, stronger, faster, genetically perfected aliens, and four, possibly six of them would have armored suits. We needed a way to even the odds before we attacked. So far, we didn't have a good plan to do that. The special forces worked feverishly to develop an attack plan, and so far, none of our ideas minimized the risk sufficiently for me to have confidence that we could succeed.
That night, I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea. My unconscious mind is apparently smarter than I am when I'm awake, I don't know what that says about me. My plan, and it was pretty freakin' brilliant in my humble opinion, would accomplish two things; whittling down the number of Kristang we were facing, and removing the Kristang's advantage of air power. If the plan worked, that is. Knowing I wouldn't get back to sleep, I got out of my cot and walked quietly across the cavern to get coffee, tiptoeing carefully around people sleeping on cots and sleeping pads. Then I walked outside, where it was chilly and damp but thankfully not raining, and I called Skippy to discuss my idea with him. Surprisingly, he shut up long enough for me to explain my idea.
"Hmmm," Skippy said, "this is your plan? Perhaps I had better get out the dictionary and explain the definition of the word 'plan' to you."
"I know what a plan is, Skippy. Other than the fact that this plan was dreamed up by a monkey, do you see any major problems?"
"I have to admit that this plan is, possibly, not the most incredibly awful stupid thing I’ve ever heard. Possibly. It is clearly in the top five of all-time stupid ideas in this galaxy, of course, from there it's a matter of judgment."
"Damn, thanks for the vote of confidence, Skippy. Seriously, do you see any problems? A lot of the plan relies on you."
"It relies entirely on me, you moron! And here I am on the other side of the freakin' star system, building a starship out of moon dust. The biggest problem, and if you had more than two brain cells, you'd know this, is that your plan has multiple potential points of failure. Unless all parts of the plan work correctly, the entire plan collapses."
"Ok, Ok, I hear you. You got any better ideas?"
"No, I'm good. Let's try this one."
"What!" I almost shouted. "You bust my balls about me making a stupid plan, and you're Ok with it?"
"Yeah, sure, it's good enough. Come on, Joe, you're monkeys. I figure, what are the odds that you'll think up a better plan?"
CHAPTER NINETEEN
We put my possibly not incredibly awful stupid plan into action two days later. Two days after that, the Kristang took the bait.
The bait was, supposedly, an Elder energy tap. Through the
ir satellites, Skippy showed the scavengers a tantalizing view of an energy tap lying on the floor of a narrow canyon, our cover story was that the artifact had been exposed by a convenient landslide. The landslide was real, the energy tap we faked up with spare parts and discarded items, it only needed to look convincing from the top of the canyon or higher.
If the scavengers were marginally competent, they would have noticed the unburied energy tap within hours of the landslide. They were completely incompetent, they didn't notice the prized energy tap lying there on the ground, in the intermittent sunshine. Skippy got so frustrated, he wanted to call every one of their zPhones and ask if there was any way they could be more stupid. Thankfully, he restrained himself, and the scavengers finally noticed after Skippy practically shoved it in their faces, by highlighting it in their daily sensor summary.
We followed their aircraft, all the way from it being flight prepped at the scavengers' base, to watching through our satellite as two pilots and eight other Kristang loaded aboard and it took off. The aircraft was very much like the Ruhar 'Buzzard' transport I knew from Camp Alpha and Paradise, only this one was a little bigger and a lot uglier. And beat up, even from high orbit the satellite cameras showed us the patched, scratched and dented skin of the aircraft. Skippy said the maintenance records indicated the Kristang did the absolute minimum required to keep it in the air, one of the engines was more than a thousand hours late for an overhaul, and the pilots complained that engine always ran alarmingly hot. The other engine ran only slightly too warm and produced plenty of power, except that it vibrated so much it practically shook loose from its mounting. When the scavengers left Newark, they wouldn't be taking the aircraft with them, I could see why they didn't want to put extra resources into keeping it airworthy. That was easy for me to say, since I wasn't riding in that rattling deathtrap. Maybe it would fall out of the sky, without us having to do anything.
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 27