That began the absolutely most miserable period of our time on Newark. For one, it rained most days, and without Skippy we didn't have weather forecasts, we could see satellite images, and there was nothing but solid cloud cover most of the time. The only time we could safely go out of the cavern was when there were solid clouds overhead, we couldn't risk being seen walking around, if there was a Kristang presence in orbit that we didn't know about. Our time outside was limited, if we went for a run or a strenuous hike, our heat signatures might be detectable even through a thick cloud layer. Most of the time, we stayed bundled up in our now grimy, smelly and always-damp cold weather gear. After we'd been stuck inside for three solid days of rain, I ventured out to collect grass, low-growing brush, and a sort of lichen off the rocks. We laid it out to dry in the back of the cavern, and two days later, we risked a small fire in a side cavern that had a hole in the roof. As best we could, we took off the under layers of our clothes and hung them up to dry. The clothes I got back smelled like a damp grass fire, but they were warm and dry. Man, that felt good, my skin had been starting to get minor sores, from constantly wearing the same wet clothes.
The only food we had left were cold, rehydrated sludges. At least people back at the main caverns near the cathedral had hot food, real food, and a variety of it. The worst for our group, huddled together in our damp, cramped, mud-floor caverns, was the lacking. Lack of exercise. Lack of anything to do. Lack of purpose. Lack of real food. People, even dedicated, elite special forces troops, get bored, and little frictions added up. The team leaders handled the minor disputes well, without me needing to get involved.
For my part, I found myself missing being able to talk with Skippy, not only not being able to get detailed status reports, I missed simply talking with that annoying, insulting beer can. When we finally received the message from Skippy that the Flying Dutchman was ready to come to Newark, I felt like dancing. To spare myself the embarrassment, I didn't. What I did do was pass the word around that we'd soon be getting off Newark, and I transmitted back to the Dutchman the 'go' code, to activate the jump we had programmed into the autopilot before we departed the ship.
Seven hours later, Skippy's voice once more boomed out of my zPhone. "Greetings, Colonel Joe and the whole barrel of monkeys down there! Tis I, Skippy the Magnificent. Because of my amazing beneficence, I bring you a starship that is almost as good as new, including such luxuries as heat, and oxygen! Also, the deluxe rustproof under coating package, at no extra charge!"
"Skippy!" I couldn't keep the pure glee out of my voice. "We're safe, there are no Kristang up there?"
"Yessiree, there be no lizards around these parts. Parts of that ship are still tumbling in orbit, but it's no threat, no one is alive aboard the wreck. We'd better hit them with a maser anyway, before we leave, just in case. How are you doing, Joe? I've been monitoring the weather, and it sure looks depressing."
"I'm all right, Skippy, we're all Ok down here. Damn, it is good to hear from you. I missed your irascible self," I said before realizing I was talking on an open channel.
"Ah, you're just happy that I brought the ship back, so you can get off that miserable frozen mudball."
"That, too. You, uh, allowing monkeys aboard your squeaky-clean ship?"
"Yuck. I'd forgotten about that. Filthy monkeys, doing filthy monkey things? Ah, what the hell, you caught me in a generous mood, Joe. Come on up here, before I change my mind. I've got two dropships on the way down. We'll need several trips to bring up everyone and all your stuff, so I loaded clean clothes and fresh food aboard."
"That was very thoughtful of you, Skippy, thank you."
"Like I said," he grumbled, "hurry, before I change my mind."
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
The dropship he sent down to the assault party couldn't hold all of us, it was the smaller of the two dropships we had left. I stayed behind, and enjoyed warm, clean, dry clothes and a hot meal of real food, while the dropship cycled up to orbit and back again. With Captain Smythe, I sent the Elder AI and the comm node up to the ship, knowing Skippy was anxious to get those two items aboard as soon as possible. We both had hoped that, by some miracle, when the new AI got close enough to Skippy, it would activate somehow, and also that he could figure out how to make the comm node work.
He called me shortly after the dropship was aboard the Dutchman, it surprised me how quickly he ran his analysis of the Elder artifacts. "No dice, Joe, the AI and the comm node are both dead as doornails. Crap, this isn't right. What could kill an AI like me? This frightens me."
"You're certain it was alive at some point, it wasn't just a canister that never got an AI loaded into it?" That would be the best scenario for Skippy.
"No such luck, Joe. No, there is a residual presence there, jumbled data, something bad happened to him. The connection of the canister, as you call it, to other dimensions has been broken, it's now merely a beer can of tightly-packed exotic materials. It was a long time ago, too, I can tell that for certain. And there's something else; whatever happened to this AI, it happened roughly around the time Newark got pushed out of its original orbit. That can't be a coincidence. If we could, I'd like to stay here and investigate this planet in detail."
"We're going to leave our two satellites, here, right? They'll collect data, we can swing by in the future and see if they found anything interesting." I wanted to know if our satellites ever saw a Kristang ship poking around the places we had lived on Newark. Even though we were going to be careful to take our trash back up with us, there was plenty of evidence from DNA alone, that humans had been on Newark. If the Kristang ever learned that fact, they were going to start asking uncomfortable questions, and I wanted advanced notice if that ever happened. Skippy judged it very unlikely the Kristang would ever again bother with Newark at all, now that it had been emptied of useful Elder artifacts, and I agreed with him. I also needed to be prudent and not assume something very bad would never happen.
"The satellites will help, a bit, what I'd like to do is perform a deep scan that the satellites can't do. Even for me, a scan like that could take months, I'd be running time back in other spacetimes, there's no way to rush that, darn it. I really do need to know what happened here, it does not make any sense. What bothers me most about it, is this incident calls into question what I think I know about the Elders. Perhaps I should have said, that's what bothers me most, other than an entire sentient species being wiped out, of course."
"I knew what you meant, Skippy. Sorry about your, I guess, brother AI. Can you do anything with that comm node?"
"No. Frustratingly, no. It's like the first one we captured from that Kristang research base, it appears to be fully functional, but it is not connecting to the network. I'll keep working with it, I don't have much else to do."
Or, I didn't say, maybe there was no longer any network to connect to. Skippy had to be worrying about that, he didn't need me to remind him of that awful possibility. If there was no longer any network enabling the Collective, then our entire fool's errand of a mission was doubly worthless.
The dropship coming back was a welcome sight, even if Skippy did set the damned thing down a half kilometer away, and a cold rain was pouring down from dark gray skies. I didn't care, I was getting safely off Newark, my entire crew was safely off Newark, in fact, I was the very last person to leave the planet. Chang was aboard the Dutchman, Simms had stayed at the main cavern until the last person and last piece of equipment and last scrap of trash had been loaded into a dropship. To speed up clearing evidence of our presence off the planet, I had ordered Skippy to use both dropships at the main cavern, until Simms declared they were finished. Until then, I waited in our cramp, damp cave, in my relatively clean, warm, dry clothes. With me were two US Army Rangers and three Indian paratroopers who had volunteered to remain behind with me, because there hadn't been enough room aboard the first dropship. We played cards and enjoyed eating real, hot food, and the day and a half delay almost flew by, because we k
new we were leaving.
We spent a few minutes peering around rocks in the caverns, making sure we hadn't left a sludge container or an old sock behind, then dashed through the rain to the open door of the dropship. I paused at the bottom of the ramp, my boots still sinking into the chilled mud of Newark. "What is it, sir?" One of the Rangers asked.
Looking up at the leaden sky, blinking away raindrops, I said "It seems like I should say something profound, something better than 'we are so out of here'. This planet wasn't always the half frozen pile of shit we experienced, it was a nice place once, with forests and deserts and tropical beaches. Like Earth. An entire civilization, and entire species, an entire biosphere was wiped out here. I feel like I should say something about these people. Maybe more important, say something about whoever the hell it was that did this."
The Ranger nodded. "We are unlikely to do anything against beings who moved an entire planet, so how about 'vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord'?"
"That's good," I agreed.
One of the Indian soldiers said "We have a saying that is, in essence, something like that; we say 'karma is a bitch'. Whoever pushed this planet out of orbit is going to get what's coming to them, one way or another."
"Amen, brother." The Ranger said, and they bumped fists.
That was more eloquent than anything I could have said, so I kicked the mud off my boots, walked up the ramp, and left Newark behind.
Being aboard the somewhat sterile, artificial environment of the Flying Dutchman again was like paradise, compared to the damp chilliness of Newark. The air aboard the ship was warm and dry, my clothing was clean and dry, I had a bed to sleep in, and real food to eat. My initial thought was to declare our first day back aboard a 'fend for yourself' day in the galley, figuring I'd spare anyone from taking a shift in the galley. Fortunately, Colonel Chang had already set a duty roster, and the Chinese team had a hot bowl of noodles waiting for me, after I dumped my dirty clothes off in my cabin and took a too-quick shower. The galley didn't look much different from before, maybe a bit larger, one of the bulkheads was further away from the door than I remembered. The whole compartment was a soothing light blue color, Skippy had done a great job. The bowl of noodles, and a cup of hot tea with sugar in it, tasted like heaven. I even tried eating the noodles with chopsticks, I was in such a good mood. "You know what I need?” I asked in particular, thinking that an hour in the gym would do me good. Or maybe a game of basketball, I felt soft and slow from laying around inactive too long. I should have known not to ask an open-ended question like that when Skippy was around, I’d gotten used to being away from him on Newark.
"A shower?" Skippy suggested from the speaker in the ceiling.
I shook my head as people laughed. "I showered after I came aboard."
Skippy made a sniffing sound. “Hmm, doesn't smell like it. Maybe you could rinse off with some of that degreaser we use on the engine couplings. Hey, Joe, there weren’t any showers on Newark?”
“No, Skippy, of course not," I replied while slurping hot noodles.
“Huh. Without a shower, how did you take care of your morning boner?”
There was nothing I could do, other than sit there with a sheepish look on my face while people laughed. “Man, I am missing Newark already,” I said.
Skippy hadn't only repaired the Flying Dutchman, he had modified it. On the dropship ride up, I'd noticed our formerly very long, spindly star carrier had been substantially shortened. Shortened to the point where, instead of long rows of docking hardpoints for shorter-range starships, there were only three hardpoints, arranged in a single ring. Instead of the engineering section at the aft end of the ship being so far away that it appeared not to be attached to the same ship, it was right behind the trio of hardpoints. "New and improved, Joe," Skippy told me, "except for the new part. And maybe the improved part. Well, some of it is improved."
I snapped my fingers. "Before I forget, Skippy, while you refueled the ship, did you get some for yourself?" Dr. Friedlander on the science team had inquired about Skippy's own fuel requirements, and that reminded me to ask him. The last time we talked about it, he only had several thousand years before he ran out of fuel. "You need, something like, metallic hydrogen?" Which I personally didn't know was a real thing or not, I thought hydrogen was a gas, not a metal. But then, what did I know of science?
"Yes, yes, I did, Joe, thank you for asking. It wasn't much, enough for eight hundred years or so. It will have to do for now."
"Great. Improvements, huh?" According to the display, we now had two functioning reactors. Two. Not six, not even four. Two. "Does reducing the number of reactors count as an improvement?"
"Yes, Joe," Skippy assured me, "these two reactors make the power of three original ones, they're more reliable, and they require a lot less maintenance, and their shielding is way better. A near-miss by an exploding warhead won't knock these new reactors out. Not as easily, anyway."
We also had only forty percent of the original compliment of jump drive coils, which was not a problem, Skippy said, because he'd reconfigured the entire drive, top to bottom. "Should have done this when we first took this ship," he said proudly, "that Thuranin drive was crap anyway. Now we can jump thirty percent further, and the coils charge eighteen percent faster. Also, the coils are divided into three separate banks, so if one bank of coils goes out of calibration, we can use the two others. Or just one, if needed, in an emergency."
I'd noticed the three docking hardpoints were empty. "The Flower is gone?"
"Yeah, sorry about that, I know you liked having a spare tire. That ship contained components and materials I couldn't get elsewhere, and I needed its reactor to supply power for a while. The Flower dipped into the atmosphere to get fuel, after it was done with that, I had to take it apart, and use most of it as a high-energy particle accelerator, to manufacture exotic materials. What was left, I loaded with trash and dropped it into the gas giant. It was a good little ship, Joe, actually, it was a piece of shit, but it served us well."
Desai wouldn't be happy about that, while she loved flying the giant Flying Dutchman, the Flower was the first starship she'd ever flown. "You did what you had to, Skippy, you performed a miracle up here, I'm sure not going to be the ungrateful monkey who second guesses you. We have only the two dropships?"
"Unfortunately, yes. Plus one drone that can be used for performing maintenance outside the ship. Should I check if any dropship dealers in the area are having a holiday blow-out sale?"
"Ha! Somehow, I suspect our credit isn't good out here."
"Good point. Unless the dealer will swap a dropship for bananas."
After a hearty bowl of noodles, I went to my office near the bridge, reading reports on my iPad, trying to act like a real colonel. What I really wanted to do was go play basketball or just hit the gym. That could wait for later. There was no rush, we'd done two successful jumps away from Newark, and Skippy was fiddling with minor adjustments to the jump drive unit. I had just bent down to untie a boot, to get comfortable for a long session of intense boredom, when Skippy called me through my zPhone earpiece.
"Hey, Joey, I have some, um, a bit of bad news for you."
"Ah, damn it, I knew I should have brought tequila or something on this trip, I need a drink before you tell me any more bad news. Do I a favor, is this bad news of the Joe-needs-to-dream-up-a-way-out-of-a-mess-Skippy-got-us-into variety?"
"No, this bad news is of the pissed-off-aliens-attacking-Earth-and-turning-it-into-a-wasteland, in-the-process-wiping-out-humanity variety."
"Holy shit." I retied my boot lace with fingers that were already shaking.
"Blasphemy is a particularly bad idea right now, Joe. Prayer would be entirely appropriate in this case.”
"What the hell happened? For crying out loud, we just left Newark behind!"
"Well, heh, heh, you know that Kristang ship I blew up there?"
"My idea."
"Oh, man, are you ever going to give that up?"
/> "What do you think?"
"No. You aren't. In your defense, I wouldn't either, if I was in your place," Skippy admitted. "That was a pretty great idea."
"Yup. So?"
"Sooooooo, before I ripped that ship apart with a perfectly aimed particle beam shot through a weak spot in its reactor containment shielding, one hell of a shot, by the way. The microwormhole exit point nutates in a random fashion, because I had to avoid causing a detectible rupture in spacetime right there, and with time dilation, I had to estimate how the particle beam would be affected by the nutation. As far as I'm aware, this is the first time a wormhole has been used to deliver a particle beam, it was an interesting exercise. I realized that I needed to create, or perhaps more accurately recreate, a branch of mathematics, using a variation of topological invariants. Then there was the speed of light time lag between the wormhole and the ship, to deal with that I realized I needed to first tag that ship with a low-powered targeting laser in order to establish-"
"Skippy!"
"What?"
"Back to the subject, please?"
"Huh?"
I rolled my eyes. That beer can needed to create a submind to keep track of his thoughts. "The subject, please. You know, the bad news about aliens turning Earth into a wasteland?"
"Oh, yeah. Huh. Anyway, hitting that ship's reactor, with a particle beam through a wormhole, was an incredible shot, if I do say so myself."
"You did say so yourself."
"If I didn't, how would you know how awesome I am?"
"I don't know, how about, hey, there's a suggestion, you tell me about this big threat to Earth, and how you found out about it?"
"Easy peasy, Joe. Before I hit that ship, I was able to download some data from its computer memory. There wasn't time for a full download, especially with the narrow bandwidth I was working with through the microwormhole, so all I was able to get is a stack of messages intended for the leaders of the scavenger group on the surface; mostly messages from their clan. I was super busy, so I didn't bother to read through that pile of crap until a few minutes ago. One of those messages warns of an impending power shift among the clans, it seems that with the loss of a wormhole connection to Earth, and the Kristang's retreat from Pradassis, that's the planet you humans call 'Paradise', the fortunes of the White Wind clan took a major, in fact fatal, blow. The White Wind clan has been forced to seek a more powerful clan to ally with, the cold truth is the White Wind are going to be absorbed into the more powerful clan, calling it an alliance is a transparent face saving move for the White Wind leadership. The alternative to being absorbed is being conquered, and their territories and properties divided by the victors."
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 40