"May I point out the glaringly obvious flaw in your plan, you brainless monkey?"
"The fact that, without the jetpack, I'm going to hit the atmosphere and burn up? Yeah, I know that, Skippy. I don't need to be reminded of that, thank you very much."
"Shit. Joe, this is the second time you've offered to sacrifice yourself for a noble cause-"
"The first time, I offered to sacrifice myself for you, you little shithead."
"No cause could be more noble indeed."
"I offered to sacrifice myself for you, because you're more valuable to the mission than I am. The Dutchman can go on without me, Chang will make a fine commander. That surveyor ship can be stopped without me, but it can't be stopped without you. Unless I'm missing something here."
"No, astonishing as it may seem, your logic is correct on this one. Damn, why does the monkey pick now to start using logic?"
Despite the situation, he made me smile. "I love you too, Skippy. You see an alternative? If we use the jetpack to rendezvous with the dropship, by the time we get there, those two tankers will have jumped away already, and we'll never find them. We will lose our one chance to intercept that surveyor ship before it reaches Earth."
"It will take the tankers longer than you think to reach a safe jump distance; this planet has a deep gravity well and they are heavily loaded with fuel. You are correct, however, that this is the only opportunity I see for being able to track these ships, and locate the surveyor."
"Right," I breathed heavily, and unintentionally fogged the faceplate for a second. "Is there any way to get you to within four thousand kilometers of that ship, and also make sure I don't hit the atmosphere? Can we split the difference, use the jetpack to move both of us just enough so I miss the planet, then you fly off to intercept the tanker?"
Skippy replied immediately, which was a bad sign. If there was any chance for both of us to get out of this, he would have paused a split second to run a couple million calculations. "Given the laws of physics, which I can't screw with because those tankers would detect us, the answer is, unfortunately, no. Joe, I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry about."
"I know that. 'Sorry' is something you monkeys say as a social courtesy, whether you mean it or not. That custom seems particularly stupid now."
"I appreciate the effort, Skippy. All right, before I change my mind," I was deliberately not looking at the planet ahead, "can you program the jetpack to fly you near that tanker, and I'll engage it with this controller on my wrist?"
"I don't like this, Joe."
"I'm not jumping for joy about it either, Skippy."
"Jetpack autonomous navigation system has been programmed. Ready." He simulated taking a deep breath. "Are you sure about this, Joe? It seems like such a waste."
"Skippy, I'm a soldier. I knew the risks coming out here," my voice choked up a bit and I paused to swallow hard. "I am not going to do nothing, and let that surveyor ship reach Earth. If you have a better idea, I am all ears."
"Legitimately, no, no, I do not have any other idea. Joe, there is a big difference, or there should be, between taking a risk of dying, and taking an action that will result in certain death. Suicide does not seem like something a soldier should do."
"Skippy, let's get real here, Ok? Yeah, in a way, this is suicide, but really, it is only an issue of timing."
"You'll need to explain that one."
"This whole mission is suicide, I explained that to everyone before we left Earth. Be straight with me, what are the odds we humans can fly the Dutchman back to Earth by ourselves, after you leave us for Collective heaven, or whatever the hell it is you're looking for?"
"Zero. Well, close enough to zero that your chances of success are statistically insignificant. If you like, I can recite the actual odds to a hundred decimal points, however, I expect you are satisfied with 'meh' level math on this one."
"You got that right."
"Captain Desai has become a skilled starship pilot, for, you know, a monkey, and she has trained other pilots well enough for basic maneuvers. My calculation of your odds are no reflection on your merry band of pirates, they are all dedicated, and, considering your species' miserably low level of development, reasonably intelligent, no offense."
Inside my helmet, I had to smile and roll my eyes. In one sentence, he insults us, and says he intended no offense. Sometimes I wondered about his intelligence.
He continued. "The problem is the Flying Dutchman is an incredibly complex machine, and you humans have no idea how it works, not really. If anything goes wrong, there is zero possibility you can fix it. Even routine maintenance, which I have been doing for you using Thuranin robots, is beyond your capabilities. The jump drive coils, for example, will drift out of calibration with each time you jump. Without me fine-tuning the jump system, I estimate the drive will become unusable within twenty, certainly twenty five jumps. Jumps that you program will be so inaccurate, that you would have no realistic chance to emerge near a wormhole. You'd have to jump as close as you can, and fly through possibly half a lightyear of normal space to where a wormhole is going to open. Frankly, you will run out of time, and food, before you got home. Although, by that time, the jump drive would be so hopelessly screwed up, you would not be able to jump at all, anyway."
"Is there any way you can load a submind into the ship's computer, to take care of that maintenance stuff for us, after you leave?"
"Ha, ha! No way, dude," Skippy laughed. "The memory and processing power on the Dutchman are much too small to contain a stable submind. It might work fine for a week, maybe two, then it would start going funky on you, and without me to adjust it, the submind would go senile and destroy the ship, So, no to that one. Before you ask, I could reload the original Thuranin AI into the computer, modified to work with you instead of wiping you out as soon as it became aware of your presence. That would not help, the Thuranin's cyborg nature is integrated into their AIs to such an extent that the AI cannot completely control the ship without them. That is both because the Thuranin wish their minds to be as close as possible to an AI, and because the Thuranin don't want an AI to be able to run the ship without them, for security reasons. Especially because the Thuranin are quite rightly concerned about the Maxohlx hacking into their systems. Many crucial control and maintenance functions require cyborg participation, particularly in controlling the robots. Humans can't fill the role of the Thuranin, and the system's processing substrate lacks the capacity for me to replicate the cyborg function inside it."
"Uh huh. Like I said before, this whole fool's errand is a suicide mission, and me falling into this planet is only shortening the trip somewhat for me."
"Unfortunately, I am forced to agree with your point. I still do not like it. Joe, I need to understand something. You came out here, knowing there is almost no possibility that you will ever return to Earth. Why? Why did you come with me?"
"The short answer is that you had that wormhole on a timer, and if we didn't come out here with you, there would be a whole lot of pissed off lizards and little green men coming to Earth and asking awkward questions. Beyond that, I came out here because I promised you that I would, it's that simple. We have a bargain, you sure kept your end of it, this is my end of the deal. We owe you, Skippy, we humans owe you more than we can ever repay. Billions of humans are safe today, because of you. I understand you don't belong with us, that you need to go home, or find answers about who you are and where you came from.”
“Huh. You monkeys are more complicated than I expected.”
“Yup, sure. Now, I'll give you a little push, so you can drift away before I engage the jetpack?"
"Yes, it would be best if you were at least eighty meters away before the jetpack fires thrusters."
There not being much left to say, I hugged the jetpack tight to my chest, then pushed it away, trying not to make it wobble or spin. My best effort left it turning ever so slowly, and left me spinning also. In a maneuver I had practiced
during training, I used my arms and legs to halt my spin, so that Skippy and the jetpack were off to my left, and I was facing the planet. Facing it, facing it right there. Damn, it looked close already. "Hey, Skippy, should I go silent now? You're taking the microwormhole with you, right?"
"You are now outside the stealth field, so, yes, you should cease even your low-power transmissions. I will send a tight beam message to you after I fly by the tanker; that should be within the next twenty seven minutes. Soon after I fly past the tanker, it will go behind the horizon of the planet, and we can communicate again. About forty minutes from now."
I almost said 'goodbye' before catching myself at the last moment. "Talk to you then, Skippy."
Man, that was a long forty minutes. On the display inside the helmet faceplate, I was able to track the two tanker ships, they were big, they were close and they weren't using stealth. In fact, their crews were chatting and exchanging data almost continuously, it would have been impossible not to notice them. Of Skippy and the dropship, hidden inside their stealth fields, I saw and heard nothing. The planet kept growing larger until it completely filled my view, in order to see the darkness of space I had to turn my head.
And, darn it, the view was eerily beautiful. The planet below me was mostly orange in color, when I left the dropship, from that far away it had been an orange blob the size of a basketball. Now I was close enough to see details, and it looked like a creamsicle; swirls of orange and white, with less prominent streaks of purple, light browns and greens. The planet didn’t have a big spot like Jupiter had, the cloud formations were more subtle; great swaths of darker or lighter clouds stretching across an entire hemisphere. Some of the clouds below were moving so fast I could see them changing as I watched, it was hypnotic. Clouds swirling and spinning and merging with each other and splitting apart. The speed at which the upper atmosphere was moving must have been mind-boggling, this is one case when I wished I could talk with Skippy, so he could bore me with sciency details. Right then, it would have been good to talk with anyone. I’d never felt so alone in my life; even when my dropship was frozen inside a comet I had at least been in a familiar environment. Walls, floor, ceiling, seats, displays and controls, and a breathable atmosphere. In my alien space suit, racing silently just above the cloud tops, there was nothing familiar or comforting around me. Nothing in sight was welcoming to warm-blooded, air-breathing creatures. The view was beautiful in its cold, unending indifference to life.
Almost exactly at the thirty two minute mark, I received a short "Mission successful" message from Skippy, then nothing for another eight minutes. That eight minutes was awful, made worse because my helmet display kept flashing a warning that I was going to hit the planet's thick atmosphere in another thirty nine minutes, and I didn't know how to turn the damned thing off. It was annoying.
Finally, another message from Skippy. "We did it, Joe! Whenever that tanker jumps, it's going to leave behind drones like a trail of breadcrumbs. And, major bonus, I was able to hack into their navigation system, and download data. We now know where and when the tankers will rendezvous with the surveyor ship! This mission is totally successful."
Except for the part about me falling into a planet. "Excellent, Skippy, outstanding. I knew we could count on you. Sincerely, thank you, from all of us."
"How are you doing?" He asked.
"Ok so far," I tried saying that as a joke. The stupid display flashed another warning at me, a warning I didn't need.
“So far? Is this like the old joke about the guy who falls off a building, and when he is halfway to the sidewalk below, he thinks to himself ‘Ok so far’?”
“Something like that, yeah, Skippy.”
"Is there anything I can do, Joe?"
"I don't know, Skippy, is there anything you can do?" Part of me was hoping he'd thought up a brilliant plan.
"About the major problem, no, I got nothing. Sorry. Anything else I can do for you?"
"Mmm, keep talking to me? Hey, I know. DJ Skippy-Skip-"
"And the Fresh Tunes, don't forget the Fresh Tunes. I also go by Grandmaster Skip."
"Sure, you got it. Play some music for me, please. You have music stored in your memory, right? Human music."
"Uh huh. All of it."
"All?"
"Yup. Well, all music that was stored in digital format, while I was on Earth. What type of music do you want?"
It still surprised me how much data Skippy could store. While we were on Earth, he'd told me that he had downloaded the entire internet, including the darknet, I hadn't quite believed him. "Anything."
"Bluegrass?"
"Anything but bluegrass."
My helmet speakers played some new age type soothing instrumental thing, something I hadn't heard before. It was nice, and appropriate.
"Thanks, Grandmaster Skip."
He didn't reply immediately, making my heart leap with fear that something had gone wrong. "Joe," he finally said, "I have been alive for a very, very long time, millions of years, I think. It just occurred to me that, no matter how much longer I exist, in all the infinite universes of probability, I will never talk to you again." He sounded convincingly broken up about it, his voice was unsteady. "That makes me very sad."
"You are an incredibly arrogant, irritating, smug little shithead, Skippy, but I'm going to miss you too."
"Joe, what do you want to do with your stuff?"
That seemed an odd question, Skippy may have been nervous and searching for something to talk about. Before I left Earth, again, I had updated my will through an Army lawyer; my parents would get everything, including my back pay. The lawyer had explained that, in the extremely likely event the Dutchman was never heard from again, I would be declared dead after three years, and my Army pay would stop accruing. It sucked, but that was the deal offered to everyone in the ExFor, I wouldn't get, and didn't request, special treatment. "You mean my stuff aboard the Dutchman? Lt Colonel Chang will know what to do with it." There wasn't much anyway. "Hey, promise me you won't give him a hard time?"
"Ugh, all right, damn, you hate me having any fun. No worse than I give you."
"Fair enough."
He simulated a sigh. "Would you like me to keep talking to you, or do you prefer silence at this time?"
"Talking, please. Hey, it won't be silent when I hit the atmosphere, will it? The air particles, molecules, atoms, whatever, will start bouncing off my helmet, and I'll hear that, I think."
"You will hear sound transmitted through the outside of the helmet, yes. Very high pitched sound at first, because you are moving at high supersonic speed. Then there will be a roaring sound. The visor that sits atop your helmet will automatically drop down and cover the faceplate to protect it, you won't have a real view then. The faceplate will switch to showing images from the exterior cameras."
"I don't like that. Can you override the visor? I want to see."
"Without the visor," Skippy warned, "the faceplate will deteriorate quickly. It is made of a tough material so it won't melt, but it will fog, and you will be blinded anyway."
"All right, fine. It's going to be quick, right? When I hit the atmosphere, this suit won't last long." The cloud tops below me looked close enough for me to reach out and touch them already.
"Although I want to tell you yes, the answer is no. Kristang armor is rugged, it will last longer than you expect. Or, in this case, I'm very sad to say, longer than you will want. The suit will hold together long enough for you to get sufficiently deep in the atmosphere, that the force of deceleration will crush you inside the suit. Other than your bones, your soft tissue will become a liquefied, hmm, guess you don’t need to hear about that. The good news is you should lose consciousness around twelve gees."
Good news? In context, I guess it was good news. "Wow, these suits are super tough. This material can take all that heat?"
"No, no. The outer protective layers of the suit will flake off, in a process called ablation. As the material heats up, it will
ablate away, exposing fresh layers below, this protects the integrity of the suit, and the wearer, as long as possible. In combat, ablation technology defends the wearer against directed-energy weapons such as masers and particle beams. And-"
He went silent. For a moment, I panicked, thinking we'd lost connection, except the music was still playing in my helmet speakers. "And? Skippy? And?"
"Give me a minute, I'm working on an idea here," he said excitedly. "Lots of numbers to crunch, need to run a couple billion simulations though the model I've built."
"Okey dokey. I'll be right here, got plenty of time and nothing to do." Nothing to do was true, the plenty of time part was not.
"Yesssss!" He fairly shouted. "Got it. Joe, while I don't want to get your hopes up too much, there is a possibility that I can do something to help."
"I'm all ears, here, Skippy."
"Well, heh, heh, first thing is, you are very much not going to like this-"
Skippy's idiotic plan, which I very much did not like, involved him repositioning his end of the microwormhole so that it was behind and slightly below me. He moved the other end of the wormhole directly in front, and very close to, the dropship. Close enough that he instructed Desai to slide the protective shield down over the composite cockpit windows, to protect the occupants from radiation. Then, and here's the part I very much did not like, he had Desai fire the dropship's maser through the wormhole, at me.
When Skippy told me his plan, my first thought was that he was offering to kill me in one quick zap, so I wouldn't suffer from being crushed inside my suit. But no, that would have been too easy. Instead, the crazy little beer can planned to use pulses of maser light, at reduced power, to boost my speed enough so I would miss the atmosphere. Maser photons impacting my suit would flake off my suit's ablative layers, propelling me forward. All this sciency BS was according to Skippy, who was, of course, safely out of the maser's line of fire.
SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) Page 45