Black Ops (Expeditionary Force Book 4)

by Craig Alanson

  “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” Smythe intoned.

  Chotek raised an eyebrow. “Quoting Shakespeare to me, Major?”

  “Yes, Sir. Also, bloody hell, proving my teachers were right all along; I told them studying the classics would be useless for me. Perhaps the problem is not that Bishop is too young, but that we expect someone with his level of responsibility to be older. The issue may be with us, not him.”

  Hans Chotek did not like being accused of allowing personal bias to affect his ability to make decisions; his diplomatic training had emphasized the importance of recognizing and avoiding personal bias. Chotek knew he was not the only person who considered Joe Bishop too young to command an important, a vital, mission. UNEF Command specifically stated that Bishop’s lack of experience was an unacceptable risk factor. “Bishop has proven himself to be brave, and clever and inventive. The military has a distinction between staff officers and commanders, I believe. Bishop could be an excellent staff officer, responsible for developing plans; it does not automatically follow that he is a good commander. He still has a tendency, an instinct, to take unnecessary risks.”

  “You approved all of our operations so far, Sir,” Smythe said evenly.

  “I did approve the operations being conducted, according to my instructions for minimizing risk. If left to himself, Bishop may have successfully taken control of the relay station, and also secured UNEF’s future on Paradise. But if he failed, the results would have been worse than the limited damage that I allowed for. And, Major Smythe, I do not know how many riskier plans Bishop did not even mention to me, because he knew I would not approve them. He may very well have done something rash, if he did not have guidance from more experienced leaders,” Chotek looked Smythe straight in the eye as he spoke. Smythe understood the implication: UNEF Command expected Smythe to act as a check on Bishop’s risk-taking instincts. When Smythe did not reply, Chotek pressed his point. “If the Kristang had not insisted that Bishop be promoted as a public relations stunt, I believe he would still be a sergeant on Paradise now. A good sergeant, most likely. But certainly not a colonel.”

  Smythe nodded, but his words did not please UNEF Command’s chosen leader. “If the Kristang hadn’t gotten Bishop promoted, Earth would still be under the control of the Kristang, and you and I might be dead. You see, Sir,” Smythe stared Chotek directly in the eye, “I have a different perspective on risk. The SAS motto is ‘Who Dares Wins’. What we’re trying to win out here is the survival of our species. There is risk in action. There is also risk in not acting.”

  Chotek sighed inwardly, mentally crossing Major Smythe of 22 Special Air Service Regiment off the list of people who could be relied on to provide a cool head in a crisis. Maybe it didn’t matter anyway, if the Flying Dutchman remained drifting powerless in interstellar space until the end of time.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Seventeen hours, seven minutes and twelve seconds after Skippy went missing, he picked up exactly where he left off. “-er. But no, I had to be extra super careful, because little Joey watched too many crappy horror movies where the dumb kids don’t know to- Hey! Joe! What in the hell are we doing way out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere?”

  “Skippy!” I shouted, getting tears in my eyes. The sudden sound of his voice in the empty, echoing silence had startled me so badly I almost pulled a muscle in my neck. “You’re back!”

  “Duh. I never left. What the hell did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I protested gently. I was so happy, I didn’t have the heart to banter back with him.

  “Oof,” he breathed that exasperated, disgusted sigh that I hated. “Come on, Joe. Somebody did something stupid, and what are the odds that it wasn’t you?”

  “Skippy, I would ordinarily agree with you a thousand percent, but not this time. You went silent on us for over seventeen hours.”

  “Ha! As if! No way, Jose.”

  “Check the dropship’s time code. Or the orbits of planets, or motion of the starfield, however you tell time.”

  “Holy shit,” he breathed a moment later. His avatar popped into life, hovering a couple inches above the copilot seat. “Joe, what happened?” He sounded frightened. Right then, I regretted his ridiculously oversized admiral’s hat, because it was not appropriate for the seriousness of the situation.

  “We do not know. When you disappeared, you were telling me about how you were poking around in that other AI canister. Hold a moment, I’m signaling the Dutchman that Skippy the Magnificent is back in action. You, uh, are back to your old self, right?”

  “Never better. Although, huh. Hmm. My reserves of metallic helium 3 have been noticeably depleted. I must have been running on internal power. That is troubling.”

  “Yeah it is. Hang on,” I started the process of powering up the dropship’s main engines.

  “Like I can hang on, you dumdum,” his avatar pointed back to his motionless beer can form, still strapped into a seat. “I don’t have hands.”

  “Yup,” I said with an ear-to-ear grin. “Skippy is back!”

  “Everyone, calm down, please,” Skippy appealed for quiet in the Dutchman’s conference room. “This was not a big deal, not for me. I was not in any danger, and it won’t happen again. All that happened was, I lost track of time while I was examining that dead AI canister. You know my sense of time is radically different from the way you meatsacks think of time. Most of the time, the vast majority of my consciousness is dormant, because it isn’t needed. If my entire being stays awake all the time, I use too much power, and I would go crazy from boredom. So, when part of my consciousness went in there, I didn’t realize how time was going by on the outside, and the remainder of me shut down temporarily.”

  I did not know whether to believe him or not. “Why did the entire ship shut down? And the lifeboat’s reactor shut down also. You have left the ship before, and it continued operating.”

  “That’s because I planned to leave the ship those other times, so I left preprogrammed operating instructions. Those only work for a limited time; I can’t perform maintenance or calibrate the jump drive coils unless I’m here. This time, the onboard systems timed out after they couldn’t contact me; they shut down as a safety measure. I will create an automated process for the ship to follow if onboard systems are not able to contact me, but, again, those systems can only run the ship by themselves for a limited time. Don’t worry,” he chuckled, “I didn’t plan to go missing.”

  “How can you be sure this will not happen again?” I asked.

  “Joe, the next time I go poking around in dark corners, I will bring a watch in addition to a flashlight. I didn’t miss anything exciting, did I?”

  “Our jump is delayed,” Chotek glared at him. “The entire crew was subject to unnecessary stress.”

  “Ok, true. On the other hand, your science team had an opportunity to attempt running the ship without me. How’d what work for you monkeys, by the way?” He said in a sarcastic tone.

  “You know exactly how it worked,” Chotek replied, his face red.

  “Uh huh, I thought so. By the way, your science team’s loony idea to reverse the power flow from the jump drive capacitors would have made the ship go BOOM. There would have been monkey parts flying in every direction. More like monkey dust, actually. Listen to me, I have said this before and you apparently did not listen. There are a lot of delicate systems aboard this ship that could cause a disaster if you screw with them, so please do not touch anything more complicated than shoelaces.”

  “We would not have had to consider touching anything, if you had not left us drifting with no power to run the life support systems,” Chotek scolded while wagging a finger at Skippy’s avatar.

  “Oh, for-” Skippy’s avatar folded its arms across its chest. “I said I was sorry. How many times do I need to say it? Hey, Joe, how about I put ‘I am very sorry and it will not happen again’ on a loop and run it until, oh, the end of time? Will that work for
you? I can set it to music if you like.”

  “I would not like. Skippy, your apology is accepted,” I said so we could move on.

  Chotek was really fuming. “Colonel Bishop, Skippy’s reckless actions-”

  “Mister Chotek, I am captain of this ship, and a shipboard system had a glitch,” I cut him off before he antagonized Skippy further and we got stuck in an argument all day. “What happened is my responsibility, and we can discuss it privately, if you wish.”

  Skippy blessedly took that as a cue to end the conversation. “Well, much as I’d simply love to stay here and listen to Count Chocula scolding me, I have reactors to restart, jump drive coils to calibrate and a jump to program. Unless you apes want to handle that for me? No? Didn’t think so.” His avatar gave a flamboyantly disdainful salute in Chotek’s direction and disappeared.

  “Colonel Bishop-” Chotek turned his anger at me.

  “Yes, Sir. I will speak with him. In the meantime, we should continue preparations for a jump?”

  “Yes,” Chotek said unhappily. My impression was he wanted more time to yell at me. “Mr. Bishop, the next time your beer can decides to go on holiday, please tell him to leave the ship running.”

  “Joe, can you keep a secret?” Skippy said over my zPhone. I was in my cabin, reading a report before I turned out the light. Or, I was supposed to be reading a report, but I couldn’t concentrate, so I was playing solitaire. And losing, every time. I noticed he didn’t use his avatar this time; that told me he wanted to be completely serious for a change. “Depends,” I turned the tablet off and put it on the floor. “On what the secret is, and who I’m keeping it from. Also,” I thought for a moment, “if a friend tells you a secret, but the secret is that they are about to do something self-destructive, you might be obligated to break the secret for their sake.”

  “I guess that’s fair. This friendship thing is still new to me, Joe. The secret is about me, and we’re keeping the secret from Count Chocula.”

  “In that case, bring it on, homeboy.” Since waking up from, wherever he had gone, Skippy had been extra disdainful of Hans Chotek. Privately, I was pissed off at Chotek also. That pompous ass had berated me mercilessly about something I had no control over, and I took that as a sign of weakness. A strong commander would have been quietly calm, and focused on resolving the problem rather than assigning blame. Chewing me out in front of the crew had only eroded my authority; you dress people down in private, not in public. “What’s the big secret? Have you discovered,” I sucked in a breath dramatically, “that you are an asshole?”

  “I’m trying to be serious, Joe.”

  “Sorry. You can understand how I’d be confused.”

  “I’m working on that. The secret is that I was not entirely truthful about what happened when I went missing. You might even say I lied my ass off.”

  “Might?”

  “Ok, I did. In my defense, I am scared out of my mind.”

  I took my mother’s advice to breathe deeply and count to three so I wouldn’t explode at him. Getting upset wasn’t going to help anyone. “Skippy, anything that can scare you must be awful. What happened?”

  “It is true that I lost track of time, but the reason I didn’t notice time going by was that my higher functions were offline. Since I woke up, I’ve been piecing together what happened. At first, I loaded a submind into the matrix of that AI canister, but each submind lasted only a short time; they quickly became unstable. That was no big surprise; without knowing the exact nature of the matrix in there, I wasn’t able to prepare each submind to adapt to the changing conditions. And the subminds were not smart or fast enough to adjust with sufficient speed on their own. Since I was able to determine there was nothing in there that posed a danger to the subminds, I extended part of my consciousness into the matrix to examine it closely. Everything went fine for a while, it was boring, really. Then, and this happened really fast while I was talking with you, I was hit by a surprise attack. Not physically, of course; this was- Hmmm. You wouldn’t understand it. To put it in very crude terms that you can relate to, this was like a computer worm.”

  “Uh, Ok, sure.” I had little idea what a ‘computer worm’ is. “Malware, right? Like a virus?”

  “Yes, except that on Earth, a computer worm is different from a virus in that worms are designed to replicate and spread. The worm that attacked me, like I said, it’s not a worm, that’s the best analogy I can give you. This worm replicated itself many times, to keep attacking while my internal systems defended my higher-level consciousness. Every time the worm was hunted down and neutralized, it popped up again somewhere else.”

  “Sounds frightening.”

  “You haven’t heard the scary part yet, Joe. The worm should have killed me, rendered me inert, whatever you want to call it. It locked up my conscious mind in a loop so I was not aware of anything, not even of time passing. I was helpless; it could have taken me apart and erased me, like it erased the AI that used to occupy that canister. The only reason I survived, Joe, was that I had sort of antibodies to fight the worm. At some point in my past, I must have encountered a worm like that before, although I probably had outside help to fight it back then. During that fight, long ago, I built antibodies to destroy that worm, and those antibodies have been waiting inside me all this time. My conscious memories have no record of that first incident, I didn’t even know they existed, but now I estimate these antibodies make up almost two and a half percent of my memory. That is a huge amount of my capacity. When this worm attacked me, my antibody subroutines protected me, firewalled off my consciousness, and attacked the worm.”

  “Whoa.” I took a moment to process that. “Where did this worm come from?” I asked anxiously. If something that dangerous was floating around the galaxy, we could be in big trouble. Any computer worm that could overwhelm Skippy, could crush the computers aboard the Flying Dutchman. Probably infiltrate and take over a Maxolhx computer also.

  “I do not know. I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know who built it, or whether it evolved from a simpler system. It was in an Elder AI canister, and that AI was wiped out a long time ago, that is the only thing I am certain of.”

  “So, what? The worm has been hiding in there all this time, waiting for another Elder AI to come along and start poking around in dark corners?”

  “No, Joe. The worm has not been waiting or hiding, not consciously. It is not sentient, it is a weapon. It was not aware of time passing. I was designed to destroy an Elder AI; after it accomplished that, it went dormant. It would have remained dormant, if I had not gone into that canister.”

  “This worm was designed to destroy an Elder AI? Not just any type of AI?”

  “Yes, it was built to destroy an Elder AI.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Skippy ordinarily would have scolded me for asking a stupid question. This time, he didn’t even give a sigh of exasperation. “It is capable of destroying lesser AIs, but the impressive capabilities of this worm would only be fully needed against an Elder AI such as myself. Any lesser worm would not have affected me, so it seems pretty obvious to me this thing was built to kill me.”

  “Skippy, you say your memories are foggy. How sure are you that you are an Elder AI?” He was speechless for such a long time, the hairs in the back of my neck rose, fearing he had gone AWOL again. “Skippy?”

  “Sorry, Joe. I was thinking about what you said. You know that I often disparage your intelligence-”

  “You can apologize any time you want,” I said smugly, waiting to hear him grovel.

  “Huh? What? Why would I- Joe, I am totally justified in disparaging your intelligence. What do you mean, how do I know I am an Elder AI? I have capabilities far beyond those of the Rindhalu or Maxolhx. My memories contain data only available to the Elder. Duh.”

  He wasn’t getting away that easily. “How do you know those are your memories?”

  “Oh, man, you are- Huh. Hmmm. The monkey may have a point there,
” he added under his breath. “Shit. Now you’ve given me another thing to worry about. Great! Just freakin’ great! Here I am getting four reactors restarted-”

  “Four?”

  “Four including the one in the lifeboat, yes. I already have enough crap to think about, and you throw me a goshdarned curveball. Damn it!” He sputtered in frustration. “The truth is, I do not know with absolute certainty that I am an Elder AI. In fact,” he muttered something I couldn’t quite hear. “I have been disturbed by something else I found in that canister; whatever AI was in there was fundamentally different from me. That was a surprise, and, hmmm, now that I think about it, trying to understand why my matrix is so different from that dead AI absorbed almost all of my attention. If I hadn’t been working on that puzzle, maybe the worm would not have been able to sneak up on me.”

  “Is the other AI’s matrix different because it was corrupted by the worm? Could that explain the difference?”

  “Uh, no. Not, not even close. It’s embarrassing, really. Sometimes your profound ignorance is cute, Joe.”

  “Great, thank you. Talking with you is a huge confidence-booster for me, as always.”

  “No problem, Joe.”

  Several jumps later, we arrived near a boring, ordinary, nothing-special M-class red dwarf star that absolutely no one would care about. According to Skippy, there were over one hundred billion red dwarf stars in the Milky Way galaxy. The starlight would make it easier for us to work on the Kristang ships. And if we encountered a threat, we could jump in near the star, where other ships could not form a jump field.

  I was just happy to see a star that was not a tiny dot. This red dwarf was not impressive from twenty million miles away; it was still a distinctive disk, not a pinpoint. After a while, the romance of being in deep interstellar space got old for me; I wanted sunlight on my face, even through a porthole.