Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  My zPhone beeped, it was Lt Reynolds, wondering where the hell was, only she said it politely. "We're on an observation deck, I think we're two," Chang held up three fingers, "no, three levels down. There's a bar here. A bar for the Kristang," I hastened to add.

  "What happened to the Kristang assigned to you?"

  "He was, uh, he had something important to do." I said, aware the Kristang were almost certainly listening. Important to do, like sleeping until he awoke with a hangover.

  "Sir, please, stay where you are. Is Lt Colonel Chang with you?"

  "Yeah, he's here, we're not going anywhere."

  Five minutes later, Reynolds and two pissed-off looking Kristang showed up to retrieve us. We were hustled back to the shuttle bay, and as soon as General Meers and his staff were aboard, the dropship door slammed shut and the alarm sounded to depressurize the bay. Despite my fear that Meers was somehow pissed at me, he didn't say anything, Reynolds didn't think it was a big deal, and the ride back down was smooth

  Chang and I never spoke about what the drunk Kristang had said, how he'd called humans 'slaves'. I thought about it a lot, and reported it to Meers' intelligence staff. To my dismay, they acted like they'd heard it all before, it wasn't news, and it wasn't a big deal. It was a big deal to me, it confirmed my worst fears that the burgermeister had told me the truth about the Kristang.

  Were we fighting on the wrong side of this war?

  CHAPTER EIGHT PLANTING POTATOES

  The first assignment UNEF had for me was, despite what General Meers had told me, to fly around and give speeches. That lasted two weeks, and, man, it was awkward for everyone involved. For me, it was awkward to wear my crisp new uniform in front of a crowd of soldiers, people who’d been in combat like I had, worse situations that I’d been in, and they were wearing the same uniforms and doing the same jobs now, while I wore silver eagles, flew around in a shiny Buzzard and ate good food with the officers. It left me feeling like a total fraud. For the soldiers who had to stand waiting for me to give my canned speech, it was awkward because they all knew I didn’t deserve to be an officer, hadn’t earned it, yet they couldn’t say anything negative. It sucked. When my speech was mercifully over, I asked people questions, let them talk about their experiences, and ignore the awkwardness of me being there. That worked for everyone. When I was standing around in a crowd, shooting the shit with soldiers, letting them tell stories of what they’d done during the aborted Ruhar invasion, I could be just Joe Bishop, and they could be soldiers, and we could talk.

  And then I had to get back on the Buzzard, fly to the next base, and do it all over again. I hated it.

  So it was a blessing when UNEF found a real job for me; planting potatoes. The Kristang told UNEF it was time for humans to grow our own food on Paradise, to reduce the logistical burden on the Kristang, and to give us some food security in case fleet actions upstairs disrupted shipments. Some genius in UNEF HQ must have decided that me giving speeches had run its course, read my personnel file and saw that I was from northern Maine, and had the brilliant insight that I must be an expert on planting potatoes. My new assignment was to coordinate agriculture activities across a quarter of the continent that UNEF occupied. We weren't only planting potatoes, of course, we had a program to plant a wide variety of crops from seeds shipped from Earth. Planting potatoes was the derisive name we applied, although I was expected to be officially enthusiastic. Planting potatoes gave me an opportunity to fly around Paradise, be seen by the troops, and according to the UNEF PR staff, it gave me a chance to be seen as a hard-working grunt who made good through hard work and initiative. It was a relief to be doing something useful.

  Along with a crash course in agriculture, I got a few more perks. As a colonel now, I had my own hamvee, and I had a driver, a Private Randall, at my new home base, on the border between the American and Chinese sectors. "Holy shit." I couldn't believe it when Randall showed me my assigned car. Literally, what I saw stopped me in my tracks.. The hamvee was a standard Ruhar vehicle, with a UNEF symbol on both sides and the roof. And a three foot tall, purple stuffed Barney strapped to the front grill. "We're a thousand lightyears from Earth, how in the hell did you idiots get a Barney?" Every possible bit of gear we needed had to make the long trip to Ecuador, up the space elevator, onto a Kristang ship, to a Thuranin carrier, through wormholes, then a reverse trip down to the surface of Paradise. All our gear had been carefully inspected to make the best use of every pound of mass and square meter of space. Yet, somehow, some joker had managed to sneak a giant stuffed Barney doll into a container. What I wanted to know was, for fuck's sake, why? And what else had people snuck aboard, that was now clandestinely scattered across the surface of Paradise?

  "We tactically acquired it, sir." Randall said with a straight face.

  "Meaning you stole it."

  "Gear adrift is a gift, sir. We wanted to make you feel welcome. Joke's over, I'll take it off the grill."

  "No, what the hell, leave it." My hamvee was no more a joke than the idea of me being a full bird colonel. I walked to the front and inspected the grinning purple dinosaur. "Maybe the hamster kids will like it.

  It was while I was out planting potatoes that we found our first fortune cookie. The last time we had communication from Earth was when the final group of humans arrived at Camp Alpha, and I had been in the third to last convoy to get there. Since we landed on Paradise, there had been no communication either to or from Earth; the Kristang said the military situation in space didn't allow them the luxury of sending humans, even injured medivac cases, back to Earth. We were stuck on Paradise for the duration of the mission, which was more open-ended than any human was comfortable with. UNEF command fretted about not being able to send status reports to, or receive orders and advice from, Earth. Ordinary soldiers like me worried about our family and friends back on Earth. Had governments made progress on restoring electricity and other infrastructure? Were supplies and reinforcements on their way to us? Had the Ruhar attacked Earth again? The burgermeister had told me it was extremely unlikely the Ruhar would, or could, mount another expedition to Earth within the next few years. Assuming she was telling me the truth.

  Then we found the fortune cookies, and everything changed. The Kristang scanned all the supplies that were delivered to the space elevators on Earth, looking for contraband. We discovered, troublingly, that the Kristang were particularly looking for digital data storage devices, which they burned out with magnetic or ultraviolet pulses. What they didn't expect was people printing words on paper, and sticking that paper on the inside of food packages. To the Kristang scanners, a reinforced cardboard container with tiny writing printed on the inside looked like any other cardboard container. Those containers were packaged on Earth, delivered dirtside on Paradise by the Kristang, and unpacked by humans. When the first supply guys opened a food package with a fortune cookie on the inside, thank God they had the smarts to not say anything about it over their zPhones; everything was word of mouth after that. The fortune cookies were carefully removed from the packaging and hand delivered to UNEF HQ, where they caused a full-blown panic shitstorm.

  I learned about the fortune cookies directly from the 3rd Division intel officer, whose hands were literally shaking when he told me the news. The info from Earth was bad, and the fortune cookies had contained secret codes to authenticate the data to UNEF HQ, so we knew it was legit. After our Expeditionary Force left Earth, things had started to go downhill. Even before I left, I'd heard rumors of the Kristang being heavy-handed; directing where our infrastructure repair efforts should be focused, taking over mining and refining facilities for critical materials, and attempting to strictly control certain information on the internet. Like most people, I figured the Kristang were doing what they needed to prepare us in case the Ruhar came back, and that there were always going to be problems when two alien species adjusted to each other. And civilians tended to whine about everything anyway.

  The fortune cookies told us
conditions on Earth has become worse, much worse. The Kristang had taken over some of the best farmland across the planet, including vast areas of the American Midwest, to grow their crops and raise their food animals. Farmers were not compensated by the Kristang for the land they'd lost, and in cases where groups of farmers tried to block the Kristang from occupying their land, they had been killed by maser strikes from orbit. The worst taking of land wasn't even land, the Kristang wanted all of Lake Superior and the Caspian Sea to grow the types of fish they ate. They planned to sterilize those entire massive lakes with powerful gamma rays, and set up their own biosphere in the water. People were warned they needed to be a hundred kilometers from the lake coasts when the gamma rays struck, which would happen when the massive dams were complete and the gamma ray satellite was ready, in a year or so. Protests in cities like Shanghai, Chicago, San Francisco and Paris had been hit by maser strikes, when the Kristang felt efforts by human governments to halt those protests had been ineffective against 'subversive elements and traitors'.

  The Ruhar had attacked us, and we thought the Kristang had been our rescuers, but the rescue had become an invasion. It changed everything, and, in a way, it changed nothing for us on Paradise. What could UNEF do? All of our supplies were delivered by the Kristang. We had no way to get home without the Kristang. Even if we now saw the Kristang as enemies, how did we know the Ruhar were any better? The Ruhar on Paradise weren't in any position to help us anyway, so it didn't matter whether we liked the Kristang or not.

  Humans on Paradise were screwed either way.

  Colonel Wilson came into the office while I was finishing a cup of coffee and reading supply reports, preparing for another foray out to plant potatoes. The coffee was bitter and bland at the same time, and had gotten cold, and I was determined to savor every drop. Those coffee beans had traveled across lightyears to get into my cup here on Paradise. It tasted of home. I didn't know if we'd ever get another shipment from Earth. Wilson poured the last of the pot into a cup, sipped it, and made a face. "I just came from General Meers HQ, he doesn't know how we should handle these rumors about the fortune cookies. The Kristang are sure to find out, I'm surprised they haven't bitched about it already. Unless they have, and HQ is keeping it quiet."

  With their near total control of our communications, there was no way the Kristang didn't know what was going on. Maybe they didn't care. People on Earth knew what was going on there, and what could they do about it, with Kristang starships in orbit able to bombard any spot on the planet with maser beams, missiles and railguns? "We need to change our mindset about our mission here," I suggested. Mindset was a buzzword I'd seen on many an Army PowerPoint slide. "We, I mean, at least we Americans, have been thinking the Ruhar hitting us was another Pearl Harbor, and we're now out in the South Pacific in WWII, hitting them back. We now know all that is crap. The truth is, we're in Operation Torch, and we're not the Allies or the Axis, we're the Berbers."

  "I'm not following you, Bishop." As a US Army officer, Wilson had to know Operation Torch was the code word for the American and British assault on North Africa in November 1942. "Berbers?"

  "The Berbers." I almost added 'sir', this Colonel rank thing was still new to me. "I think that's what they're called. The natives in North Africa, who were caught between the Allied invasion on one side, and the Germans, Italians and Vichy French on the other. Neither side gave a shit about the natives, or their lands. The Germans and Italians wanted North Africa so they could control the Med, and to force the British out of Egypt to get access to oil fields. We and the Brits wanted to push Rommel back across the Med, so we could hit Sicily and then Italy." I was skimming over the truth; the Allies didn't decide where to go following victory in North Africa, until long after the Torch invasion. "The Berbers got caught in the middle, and all they could do was follow orders from whatever side occupied their territory at the time, get out of the way, and try to stay alive. That's us now. We don't mean shit to either side, except how they can use us, or use Earth as a staging base. We're just crunchies under the treads of their tanks. We need to stop thinking that we're allies of the Kristang, and realize we're just native troops they can use as cannon fodder. The Free French back then had Berber troops called Goumiers, but they weren't treated anywhere equal to French soldiers. UNEF needs to stop thinking of any grand ambitions out here, and focus on survival."

  Wilson frowned, but nodded. "You may be right, Bishop."

  I swallowed the dregs of my coffee and picked up my helmet and goggles. "If we're going to have any survival options, I'd better get back to planting potatoes. Lots and lots of potatoes."

  I caught a Buzzard flight out to a village in the middle of nowhere, hours of listening to the engines drone and farmland pass by beneath us. Unfortunately, I was left alone with my thoughts, and that wasn't a pleasant place to be. When I'd seen that first Ruhar assault ship skidding across the potato field in my home town, the first thing to cross my mind, right after 'shit is this really happening' and 'why the fuck would aliens invade Thomsons Corners', was 'Game Over'. Hollywood movie bullshit aside, any species with the technology, resources and incentive to travel between stars was going to crush humanity like a bug. Forget about fantasies of plucky humans defeating the aliens on the ground. Aliens could sit comfortably in orbit and pound us into dust at their leisure. All the determination and human spirit in the universe wouldn't mean a damned thing if they could hit us, and we couldn't reach them. Even if we managed to retarget and launch nuclear-tipped ICBMs, those missiles couldn't reach high orbit, and any aliens would have to be totally blind not to see the blazing hot rocket exhaust. It would be shocking if an ICBM warhead got within a hundred miles of an alien ship, they'd probably not make it above the lower atmosphere. Game Over.

  That wasn't only me disparaging humanity's prospects of surviving an alien invasion, that's what the Kristang had told us. The lizards had told a lot of lies, but in this case, they were truthful. They'd told the truth, to make us realize how much we needed the Kristang to protect us from the Ruhar, or so we'd thought at the time. The point was: humans stuck on the ground, aliens had the high ground of orbit and beyond. Game Over.

  When I decided to try capturing an alien soldier, all I had been thinking was humanity needed intel about the invaders, if we had any chance at all of surviving in any fashion. And that I needed to do something, even if it was rash and stupid. And that I'd probably get killed, but since all of humanity was about to get wiped out, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, right?

  Then, the Kristang cavalry came over the horizon, and we were saved. Damn, I remember that feeling, when we were being hunted by that Ruhar tow truck. My underwear was damp at that time, I am not ashamed to admit it, because my underwear was damp and my mouth was dry and my hands were shaking, but I stood my ground anyway. I was bracing myself to die in a blaze of gunfire, and then the sky twinkled again, and a miracle happened when that Ruhar dropship stood on its tail, and shot into the sky with a supersonic boom.

  We were saved! All my fears were swept away. And I was grateful to our rescuers.

  That was all bullshit.

  This was worse.

  The Buzzard landed, I got into a hamvee, which wasn't my personal Barney hamvee but a generic model, and we rolled out soon after, a potato-planting convoy of four hillbilly armored hamvees and six heavy tandem trucks. It irritated me that the convoy had been sitting around waiting for me; I'd hated waiting for officers when I was a grunt, now I hated making soldiers wait for me.

  My hamvee smelled like feet, stinky feet. And, something like aftershave, or cologne? It must have been parked somewhere the hamsters had been using that nasty stinky fertilizer, then someone tried to deodorize it with cheap cologne. "Damn, this smells like my grandfather's cologne." I groused.

  "Sorry, sir," the driver said, she was a private with 'Park' on her nametag. "It smelled like this when we picked it up from the motor pool."

  "It smelled worse this morning." A soldier named Olafson sai
d from the passenger seat. "We left the windows down to clear the smell out."

  "Olafson, huh?" He was blond, about six feet five. "You always been this big, or has the Army been feeding you too much?"

  "My mother was a good cook, sir."

  "Uh huh." I wasn't good company, wasn't in the mood to be good company, so I stuck my nose into reports downloaded to my tablet, and the two soldiers in the front seats took the hint. The Agricultural Intelligence Office of UNEF HQ had prepared a series of reports for me, about the next area where we'd be planting crops; soil tests, climate, rainfall, groundwater, the types of crops the Ruhar had been growing there, and the chemicals they'd used. The fact that UNEF had quickly established an 'Agricultural Intelligence Office' spoke volumes about our uncomfortable situation on Paradise. I thought it had been a joke when I'd been assigned to plant the crops we needed to survive on Paradise; I had helped my parents with their small farm, but I was in no way an agricultural expert. It was amazing to me how much I'd learned in a short time. Fear of starvation is a great motivator. The place where we'd be planting crops looked to be about perfect, it was close enough to the equator that we might get two or three crops per year, had plenty of rainfall, and good groundwater for irrigation during the summer dry season. I checked the manifests of the trucks in our convoy, we were heavily loaded with soil conditioner, because the local dirt needed to be prepared before Earth organisms would grow well. When I'd read all I could understand about agriculture, I turned to the other reports UNEF expected me to read. Who knew being an officer involved so much reading? It was like being back in school. I hoped there wasn't a quiz tomorrow.