Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  You'd think Walorski would be grateful, and he was, he was also a soldier and he saw everyone else, except for me and Desai, practicing with either Kristang powered armor, or with combots. Walorski protested that he should be given a combot, that he should go along in a dropship on the raid, that he wasn't qualified as a pilot, and didn't want to stay behind while everyone else risked their lives in a battle that was crucial for the survival of humanity. He said this to me, his commanding officer, who would be staying behind while everyone else risked their lives in a battle that was crucial for the survival of humanity. Walorski needed to work on his people skills, that was for certain. Would I have felt the same way, not wanting to be left behind while my fellow soldiers fought the enemy? Hell, yes, I did feel that way. The raid on the asteroid would likely determine whether our home planet, our entire species, remained under the boot of the Kristang, might determine if humanity survived in any recognizable fashion. No way in hell did I want to remain behind in relative safety on the Dutchman, able to jump away if the ship was threatened. After the battle, whatever happened, I’d forever know that my part in the action had been to sit in a chair. And everyone else would know it too. My attempts, to convince Private Walorski that he was needed aboard the Dutchman as a backup pilot, were hindered by the fact that I wasn’t entirely convinced myself. He was verging on open insubordination, when Skippy intervened by stating Walorski couldn't be useful as a combot controller without full use of his left hand. Walorski could assist Desai in flying the ship with one hand, or he could sit around doing nothing, but he would only get in the way on the raid. It was a contest who was more unhappy; me or Walorski.

  There was one large group of unhappy people aboard the ship: everyone who was training with powered armor or combots in the cargo bay we’d set up for combat drills. They were unhappy because Giraud had made the mistake of assigning Sergeant Adams to the task of converting a cargo bay into a combat simulator, and designing the training program. Neither of those were a problem. The problem was that, as she was in charge of the training, she picked the music that blasted out of speakers in the cargo bay. Loud music was distracting, and it helped to train people to work while distracted and while their ears were assaulted by noise so loud you couldn’t think straight. Like what happened in combat. Loud music wasn’t the problem, the problem was Adams’ atrocious taste in music. When I’m training for some intense physical activity, whether for combat or simply working out in a gym, I want some heart-pounding, fist-pumping tunes. Rock & roll, rap, something with a good beat to it.

  What Adams used for a playlist was gospel music, Cajun, jazz, polka and, I kid you not, bluegrass. Blue fucking grass, like, banjos and guys singing through their nose in that whiny affectation that makes me want to break the banjo over the guy’s head. I’m not a big bluegrass fan, in case you were wondering. Country, yes, bluegrass, no. And none of the songs were good examples of their genre, Adams had definitely dug way down to find the kind of crap songs artists use to pad their albums when they run out of ideas, or talent, or both. Oh, and she’d play the same awful song over and over and over and over. Try concentrating with that blasting your ears.

  It turns out, Adams is an evil genius. If you like the music you’re listening to, you can get into a rhythm and it’s not distracting. If the music is like fingernails on a chalkboard to your ears, you’re going to devote part of your thinking capacity to daydreams about the best way to kill the person who picked the playlist, and you’re going to be distracted, and the whole point of the training is for you to learn how to concentrate and ignore distractions. It was effective.

  The music still sucked, effective or not. The first time I watched an exercise, as soon as it was over, I went old, old school and put on some Coolio. That got me a relieved thumbs up from the crew, it was the best morale-booster since the crew had watched our unwanted Kristang ships disappear in an antimatter fireball within the gas giant. Score one for me.

  After watching the crew drill with powered armor or combots, I was impressed, and beginning to have hope we could pull off the raid successfully. Our six mech soldiers, in their Kristang armored suits, were fast, and could carry the heavy Kristang rifles easily. The asteroid's gravity was only two percent of Earth normal, so for training, Skippy reduced gravity in the training cargo bay to two percent. Two percent meant people in suits, and combots, needed some way other than gravity to avoid floating off the floor in the research base. The combots automatically gripped floors, walls, ceilings, whatever they needed to in order to move where the operator wanted them to go, they had gripper pads on the feet, knees, hands, elbows, anywhere it might be useful. The Kristang suits had grippers on the bottoms of their boots and palms of their gloves, of course, but also at the elbows, shoulders, back of the helmet, knees and on the suit's butt. Our suited soldiers needed to learn how turn on and off, and adjust the force of, the grippers.

  Overall, we were not concerned about the ability of the combots to maneuver as required. The powered armor suits took a lot of practice to get used to. The problem the suited soldiers had in the combat training maze Adams had set up, was not getting around corners and through doors, it was dialing down their speed and power. They were moving too fast and bouncing off walls. Three suits got busted in training, we had six spares aboard the Flower, and spare parts, what we didn’t have were spare humans over six feet tall. I advised Giraud to slow down and take it easy, we couldn’t afford for anyone to get injured during training. People wearing the suits were sore enough without crashing into things, even at the maximum limits of adjustment, the suits were too big. We put padding in the boots to lift up people’s feet, it helped somewhat. I tried on a suit, and, at six feet three, I felt it digging into my knees, my crotch, under my arms and I had to stretch my neck to avoid banging my chin on the bottom of the helmet.

  The Kristang suits were impressive. The Thuranin combots were awesome. There were two types of combots, we used the smaller one exclusively, as Skippy said the larger heavy model might not fit through passageways in the asteroid base. The smaller combot had three legs for stability, and three arms. Two arms were for stability or climbing, the arm in the center was for weapon attachments, and Skippy had fabricated goggles that allowed our operators to both see through the combot’s optical sensors, and also control the guns. The guns pointed wherever the operator looked, with a crosshairs in the goggles for aiming. Skippy’s original plan was for the operator to control the weapon triggers by blinking, Giraud had squashed that idiotic plan by pointing out that most human blinking was involuntary. At Giraud’s suggestion, the trigger was controlled by the operator’s index finger, either left or right depending on the person. Selection of weapon, the rifle or the rocket/grenade launcher, was controlled by the operator’s thumb. We couldn’t use live ammo aboard the Dutchman, a problem since it would be best for the operators to get a sense of their weapon’s effectiveness. Skippy warned that, even inside the asteroid base where there was little concern about tearing a hole in the asteroid’s thick skin and causing an atmospheric containment breach, we should use the rockets and grenades sparingly on our way in. On our way back, to provide cover, we could blast anything we saw. The plan was to blow up the entire asteroid anyway, erasing any trace that humans had ever been there.

  The actual raid went perfectly according to Skippy and Giraud’s plan. At first. And then it all went to shit.

  Before we made the jump into the star system that contained the asteroid base, the entire crew other than Desai and Walorski assembled in the dropship bay. It was time for one last equipment check, to make absolutely sure that everything the raiding party needed was loaded aboard the two dropships, and everything was working properly. An extra combot was loaded aboard each dropship, making the already snug interior even more cramped. The Thuranin may have built high ceilings into their star carriers to accommodate guests, they hadn't done that with their dropships. The dropships were so cramped that the six people who would be wearing Kristang
armor, needed to get into the armor before boarding the dropships, despite the extra time they'd have to spend in the uncomfortable suits.

  After supervising the inspection, Giraud gave a short but effective speech, much better than anything I would have said. He didn't use any fiery language, or try to inspire people, they didn't need inspiration. He simply stated that we would only get one chance at this raid, one chance to free Earth from the Kristang. No matter what the cost, we were not leaving the asteroid without the wormhole controller module. Everyone had studied the mockup Skippy had fabricated, the module was a long, skinny box about four feet long, and six inches on each side, Skippy said it folded out and expanded to make an 'X' ten feet across. Anyone who saw a module would pick it up, if they were wearing a Kristang suit, or signal a suit wearer and wait if they were operating a combot. We couldn't risk damage to the module by attempting to pick up the module with a combot, even our most gentle operators routinely crushed things with the combot's immense strength. Without cybernetics, the operator lacked enough feedback to avoid crushing objects in the combot's grasping claws. Combots would lead the way through the base, with our six suit wearers in the rear.

  Giraud told me he would have liked another two weeks of combat practice, he didn't say that to the crew. Skippy was anxious to hit the asteroid base as soon as possible, with the fluid military situation in the sector, he was concerned the Kristang would reinforce their asteroid research base, or worse, pack up anything of value and take it away, disperse the stuff across the stars. We couldn't take that risk, so I decided we'd jump into battle as soon as possible.

  Before we launched the raid, Chang and Giraud had a conversation with me. They wanted me to assure them that, if that raid looked like it was going to fail, and humanity's involvement was at risk of being exposed, I would not hesitate to blow the asteroid and jump away. If we couldn't recover the Flower, I'd need to vaporize that ship also, it was dusted with human DNA. Chang and Giraud made me promise, because they knew I'd be going against every instinct I had as a soldier, that I wouldn't hesitate to abandon the raiders and escape. Live, to fight another day. Despite was Giraud told the crew about the raid being our only chance, humanity still had some chance, as long as Skippy was safe and on our side. If the raid failed, the Dutchman could try to pick up new crewmembers at Paradise or Earth, and continue to search for a wormhole controller module, I didn't see how that would work, but it was not completely impossible.

  I promised. It made me feel like shit, but I did it. I owed it to our crew. They were willing to risk their lives on this crazy mission, I needed to understand the mission was worth their lives, however the mission ended.

  Walorski had no idea how much I didn't want to remain aboard the Dutchman while our crew, my crew, went on the raid.

  We jumped in close to the asteroid, within two million miles. The jump in and subsequent maneuvers were preprogrammed by Skippy because the timing was so tight, all Desai did was press a button on my command. A split second after we jumped in, the Flower was ejected, performed a microjump, and the Dutchman did a short-range jump in the opposite direction. The Flower formed a jump point for another microjump, then the field collapsed as planned, and the Flower tumbled, dead in space. The effect, according to Skippy’s logic, was for the immediate area to be flooded with overlapping jump field waves, masking the presence of a second ship. The Flower tumbled out of control, thrusters firing randomly, with the ship leaking radiation. We wanted the Flower to attract attention, while the Dutchman zipped away unseen. Skippy had the Flower broadcasting the IFF codes of a frigate that had disappeared in the area two years before, during a skirmish with another Kristang clan, our hope was the Kristang would be confused and curious enough not to immediately blast the Flower to pieces. The more the Kristang investigated the Flower, the less they'd be likely to notice the Dutchman.

  It worked. By the time the Kristang directed their sensors to widen their scanning radius, Skippy was in their network and directing the system to ignore the huge Thuranin star carrier sneaking up to their front door. We tripped the stealth detection grids as we passed through their field lines, and the sensors identified us, the Kristang computers simply ignored those inputs. Desai parked the Dutchman behind an asteroid two thousand miles away from the target, and Skippy launched the dropships.

  When Skippy first told us we would be raiding an asteroid, the picture I had in my mind was a jagged, irregular chunk of rock, like asteroids in space movies. This asteroid was technically a planetoid, it was almost three hundred miles in diameter, big enough that its gravity had shaped it into a sphere. Still, it was a pockmarked, ugly gray and brown, frozen and desolate pile of rock. On one side was the research base, on the other, a much larger Kristang military base. A large military base, with a thousand soldiers, assault dropships, gunships, and enough missiles to blow the Flying Dutchman to pieces. Hanging around somewhere in the area was a squadron of frigates, six destroyers and a cruiser. And we were going to bust in, take what we wanted, and get away cleanly.

  Skippy was true to his word, the military base was interested in the Flower, and had tasked a pair of frigates and four dropships to investigate our decoy. The military base had sent a message to the research base to go on high alert, the research base never received that message because Skippy intercepted it, but Skippy replied for them so the military base thought everything had been locked down. We had nearly-complete surprise when the dropships approached the docking bay doors. The docking bay controller thought the doors were opening for a pair of Kristang dropships sent to reinforce security, and that's what Skippy told the base computers to display. Our dropships landed, and deployed combots with our six soldiers in powered armor suits. Everything would have gone perfectly except that there was a Kristang maintenance technician, in a space suit, working on the mechanism just inside the doors. He saw with his own eyes that our dropships were Thuranin, no way Skippy could hack his optic nerve, and this dedicated worker did his duty, and shouted a warning on the radio. A warning that got buried by Skippy. When no one responded, the eager-beaver Kristang ran across the bay and pulled a lever that triggered a hardwired alarm. The only way for Skippy to kill a hardwired alarm was to burn out the hardline electric circuit, which he did with a power surge after the alarm rang out twice. And he instructed the computer to announce the alarm was false, that it had been triggered by the power surge.

  That would have bought us another two minutes, enough time for the raiding party to place explosive charges on the inner door and blow it in a controlled fashion. It would have, except the model citizen Kristang knew something was extra wrong when the alarm only sounded twice, and he sprinted toward a weapons locker. That drew the attention of the raiding party, who gave our Kristang Employee Of The Year his reward, not in the form of cash or a prime parking space, but by concentrated fire from a half dozen combots. And that's when the trouble started, when the Kristang disappeared in a cloud of bloody vapor. The explosive rounds our keyed-up pirates selected for their combots went right through the Kristang, and hammered into the wall of the docking bay. The Kristang in the research base didn't need any electronic means to notify them that something was majorly wrong, they could feel the vibration of the explosive rounds through the floors and walls.

  At that point, Giraud ordered the combots to clear a lane, and he wasted the inner door with a rocket, he had the warhead selected for shape charge. The door exploded inward, this was less than optimal because part of the door was still hanging in jagged pieces attached to the frame. This is where our lack of experience hurt us, Giraud should have dialed the rocket warhead for a wider blast instead of maximum penetration, the door was tough but not armored. At that point, blasting the wall on either side of the door to clear a path would have sent debris flying all over, so we wasted time having a pair of combots rip the doorway clear with their grappler claws. One of the combots was a bit too enthusiastic and used too much force, a big chunk of door and frame came flying across the
docking bay in the low gravity and narrowly missed knocking out a combot. The human operator of the combot couldn't react in time, the combot's automatic systems made it duck out of the way, allowing the chunk of door to hit Chang on his left side. The impact sent Chang flying across the bay, ruptured his pressure suit, and cracked several ribs. We later learned two of his ribs were broken. I'd fallen off a dirtbike once and cracked a rib, the pain had me crawling on my knees trying to catch my breath, except that breathing made the pain even worse. It took me an hour of sitting or laying on the ground before I was able to get back on the dirtbike and very slowly ride back home, where my parents took m to the hospital. Chang's Kristang suit lining had a gel that hardened on exposure to vacuum, it sealed the hole to prevent his air from leaking out. Somehow, even though it must have been incredibly painful, Chang got back to his feet and back into action on adrenaline and pure guts. The guy was spitting up blood, and that didn't stop him. Skippy was showing data from the medical monitors in Chang's suit, it looked bad, I don't know how Chang wasn't curled up in a ball on the deck, and I wanted to tell him to pull back to a dropship and let the raiding party continue the mission. I didn't do that. I needed to trust that if Chang couldn't continue, he'd tell me. And Giraud was there with Chang, if Giraud thought Chang was combat ineffective, Giraud would signal me privately. We needed Chang, we needed everyone, as long as he wasn't a liability to the mission, I wasn't going to interfere from ten thousand miles away. The motors in his powered armor, and the low gravity may have helped take part of the strain from Chang, we'd need to see how he handled combat.