Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “We’re supposed to take cover,” Cornpone responded, one eye on the sky and one eye on his precious flock of chicks. People were running across the field toward the three shelters. Other people were taking a wait and see attitude. Regulations called for taking shelter until it was positively determined that the ship overhead was not a threat. “I also think these chicks are worth more than you and me.”

  “You got that right,” Ski agreed. UNEF could afford to lose a couple soldiers, that would be two less mouths to feed. “Twenty seconds.”

  Jesse looked at the sky again. Another tell-tale sign of trouble in the sky was ship-to-ship weapons fire, and he didn’t see any. That wasn’t always a reliable indicator; masers and railguns weren’t usually visible in the vacuum of space unless they hit something. And the initial launching boost flare of missiles was sometimes hidden enough by stealth effects that they couldn’t be seen from the ground. Not by the naked human eye, not in the bright sky of mid-morning. “Oh, hell, the shelter’s probably a mud pit anyway.” Just then, their zPhones simultaneously squawked an All Clear signal.

  “Great!” Ski laughed. “Perfect timing.” A guy who had been running full speed across the field toward a shelter slowed to a stop, and shouted an expletive that Ski couldn’t quite hear. He could guess well enough what the guy said. Ski waved with a grin, and the guy returned a middle finger salute. “Yeah, you too, buddy,” Ski muttered, and looked up at the sky again, pondering something.

  “What are you looking at now?” Jesse asked.

  “Trying to decide whether I was kind of hoping that ship was the Kristang coming back,” Dave admitted. “Coming back big time, to take the planet back again.”

  “Y’all better not hope the lizards come back,” Jesse warned. “We surrendered our weapons to the hamsters. The Ruhar loaned us equipment to clear the jungle and plow these fields,” he pointed to the growing corn. “That makes us traitors as far as the lizards are concerned. If they come back, we’re screwed.”

  Dave frowned and shrugged. “And if the Kristang never come back? If we’re stuck here with the Ruhar in charge? Like, forever?”

  “Then we’re screwed either way. Welcome to the Army, man.” Jesse turned his attention back to the chicks. They needed to be fed again. Fed scarce grain that wasn’t available to humans. Having eggs and milk would be great for the protein supply; feeding chickens, cows and goats also consumed a lot of calories that might better have been used as human food. Raising chickens for eggs, and cows for milk, was much more important for human morale than for nutrition. The prospect of a steady supply of eggs and milk promised that the future would be better. That humans on Paradise would not always be POWs, that they would not live out the rest of their lives on a faraway alien world. That someday, something would change, and people could go home. He wasn’t raising chickens, Jesse thought. He was growing hope.

  The chicks looked up at him hungrily and peeped loudly. “I hear y’all, food’s coming. Another day on Paradise, man,” Jesse shook his head. “Another day on Paradise.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  Earth orbit

  My name is Joe Bishop, and sometimes I hate my life. Especially when a certain super smart ancient alien artificial intelligence asshole makes things difficult for me. “Skippy,” I asked in frustration, “what the hell did you do?” Damn it. Coming home from our mission that had saved the Earth again, I didn’t exactly expect a ticker tape parade in New York City. Especially since no one had used ticker tape since, like- hmm. What was ‘ticker tape’ anyway? I suppose I could ask Skippy, if I wanted to risk death by boredom from a long, overly detailed explanation. It wasn’t sticky like duct tape, I knew that. Confetti? Ticker tape was a type of confetti. Whatever confetti was. Or was confetti a type of Italian ice cream? No, that was gelato. Whatever.

  Anyway, while I didn’t expect a parade, I also hadn’t expected to land in a pile of shit up to my nose, either. Except that’s what happened, right after the Flying Dutchman returned to Earth from our SpecOps mission, and UNEF Command learned that we had prevented a Thuranin ship from traveling all the way to our home planet. We had stopped a Thuranin ship from coming to Earth, which likely would have led to the enslavement or extinction of humanity. Hey, great job, UNEF Command told me with one breath. With the next breath, they told me how much trouble I was in. How much trouble I’d been in, since shortly after the Flying Dutchman had jumped away from Earth orbit, on the mission we had not been expected to ever return from.

  What Skippy had neglected to tell me or anyone aboard our captured Thuranin pirate ship, was that he had planned a surprise before we jumped away. A nasty, totally unexpected, unpleasant surprise.

  Never, never, trust a shiny beer can.

  “Hmm. You’ll have to be more specific, Joe,” Skippy said. “What, of all the things I’ve done, are you bitching about this time?”

  “You know damned well what I mean! You put that Kristang troopship on a timer and jumped it away from Earth orbit the day after we left!”

  “Oh, that. Hey, if you knew what I did, why did you ask what the hell I did?”

  “Oh, for-”

  “Is this one of those stupid human things, where you ask ‘what’ when you really mean something else, like ‘how’, or ‘why’?”

  “You know what I-”

  “Or did I just malign your whole species, when the real problem is specifically Joe Bishop stupidity? If so, I apologize to monkeykind.”

  Sensing that he was only going to interrupt me again, I paused to collect my thoughts. I was in my office near the bridge, I’d gone there after getting royally chewed out by UNEF Command. The Dutchman was in a stable orbit, and there wasn’t anything for me to do as the captain other than finish my official mission report, and prepare for the crew to go down to the surface. To go home. Against the odds, we had returned. “That was my fault for not being specific. Why? The correct question is, why? Why did you do it? And why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Huh. This is kind of a multiple choice question, Joe. I didn’t tell you about it after we jumped away, because there was no reason for me to do that, duh. If I did, you would have pestered me about it every freakin’ day, right?”

  “Could be, probably,” I admitted. “Whatever.”

  “And if I had told you about it before we jumped away, you would have done something characteristically stupid, like trying to stop me. Which would not have worked, by the way.”

  “You don’t know that for sure,” I insisted.

  “I don’t? Of the two of us, which one has the most patience and is the most stubborn? As a test, let’s see how long we can each hold our breath.”

  “Not funny, Skippy. All right, granted, you were going to do it anyway. The question still is, why? Why jump that ship out of Earth orbit? It’s circling the Sun halfway to Mars now! We were counting, all of humanity was counting on getting access to that ship, access to its technology!”

  “I did it for you, Joe.”

  “For me?” For a moment, I was speechless. “Listen, Skippy. If you think putting an alien ship out of reach is a gift, please don’t go shopping for my birthday.”

  Skippy sighed. “Not you specifically, Joe. I did it for your species.”

  “Because it entertains you to mess with us?”

  “Well, that too,” he admitted. “Man, I wish we’d been here to see the faces of major Earth leaders, when they saw that their tempting source of alien technology jumped out of easy reach. Ha ha! That would have been great! Hmm, you know what, I’m sure there must be video of that somewhere, let me search-”

  “We need that technology, damn it! Skippy, we got lucky learning about the Thuranin sending a ship to Earth. If an alien ship ever does get here, we need advanced technology to defend ourselves.”

  “Advanced technology? Wait, you mean Kristang technology? Ugh, sometimes I forget how primitive your species is, that lizard technology impresses you. Ok, maybe I can see you monkeys being awed by bright shiny things ab
oard that troopship.”

  “Not everyone has your God-like level of technology, Skippy, we have to do things the hard way. We’re getting off the subject as usual when I talk with you. Go back to explaining why you did this in order to help humanity.”

  “Exactly.”

  “A little more detail on that, please. Like, how does this help us?”

  “It removes a major reason for you monkeys to whack each other with sticks. And it gives you a reason to cooperate.”

  “Ah.”

  “You see it now?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Crap. He truly had been trying to help us. “When that troopship was in low Earth orbit, maybe a half dozen nations were capable of sending a team up there to take possession and then fight over it. But now that it’s halfway to Mars, nations have to cooperate on a joint mission to get there?”

  “You are one hundred percent accurate on that one, Joe. In my estimation, there was a better than 50-50 chance some nation would have nuked that troopship into vapor in Earth orbit, to prevent a rival nation from controlling its technology. Instead, for the past few months, your NASA has been cooperating with the space agencies of China, Europe, India, and also Japan. They are building a crude tin can of a spacecraft to travel out to the troopship. You might remember that before we left, there was an argument going on between the UNEF nations about who had rights to alien technology? One of the Kristang dropships that I shot down crashed in shallow water off the Philippines, and four navies almost got into a shooting war over recovering it. This is after international cooperation and sacrifice aboard the Dutchman saved all of your miserable monkey asses.”

  “I remember.” That was a minor dust-up just before the Dutchman departed. I figured it was going to amount to nothing more than harsh words being exchanged, political posturing to please each nation’s domestic audience, and a negotiated agreement. Smashed lizard technology wasn’t worth fighting over. It especially was not worth fighting over, when the nations involved had such a monumental amount of work to do rebuilding our planet from the ravages of the Kristang. Perhaps I was underestimating the short-sightedness of political leaders. “Your motive was good, Skippy, and I see why you couldn’t announce it beforehand.” If he had jumped the troopship away before the Dutchman left, the UNEF governments would have insisted that we recover that ship before departing for the wormhole. Which, because those same governments had taken so long to make the inevitable, obvious decision, we did not have time for. “And instead of being angry with and hating each other, those governments now all agree on one thing; they all blame me.”

  “That is totally unfair, Joe.”

  “They’re not going to blame you, because they already knew you are a sneaky little beer can. And they won’t blame themselves for trusting you. That leaves me at fault, although I don’t know what they expected me to do. I guess I’m at fault for not persuading you not to do, something I didn’t know you were going to do.”

  “It’s not your fault, Joe. I should have left a message to explain why I did it, after the ship jumped away.”

  “Even if you had baked a cake and delivered that message in person, it would still be my fault, Skippy. I am, was, the mission commander.” It was almost time for me to take the silver eagles off my uniform and put the sergeant stripes back on. Unless they were going to bust me back to Private Bishop before I left the ship. “Anyway, that’s all water under the bridge now. We need to go get that ship.”

  “As I already explained to those dumdums at UNEF Command, that ship’s reactor is in cold shutdown, and I will not help you ignorant monkeys screw with it. I used the last energy in the jump drive capacitors to jump it away, so it can’t jump back. And if you’re thinking of jumping the Dutchman out there, good luck programming a jump accurately enough without me. Also, darn! I just discovered a fault in the calibration of our jump drive coils, I need to take them offline. I hate it when that happens. Could take a long time to fix, or a short time. If you know what I mean.”

  “You forget that we have two Thuranin dropships, and we can mostly fly those without you.”

  “Ha! No, I did not forget that, mi amigo. We have two, and only two dropships. It’s too hazardous to send a single dropship out that far, so you will need to send both. And they will both have to stay there for a very long time, while your idiot scientists try to figure how to get the troopship back to Earth. Good luck with that, by the way. During that time, we will not be able to use those two dropships to bring crew and supplies up to the Dutchman.”

  “Crap. You planned this?”

  “Nope, I got lucky, it just worked out exceptionally well for me. According to your underdeveloped understanding of ‘luck’, that is. Remember, we did not expect to come back here. If you monkeys still want that troopship, you are going to have to do it the hard way.”

  After I landed at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for debriefing by UNEF Command, the US military and CIA, I received a thorough ass chewing. I mean, there was a line of officers and government officials a mile long lined up for an all-you-can-eat buffet, and my hide was on the menu. They had been pissed at me before we returned, about the Kristang troopship being inaccessible. Our unexpected return had given them a new reason to throw me in the manure pile. Within five minutes of us contacting UNEF Command after we jumped into orbit, I had transmitted my mission report and summary. All the other officers onboard had sent their own mission reports, which I had not censored in any way. Five minutes after my own report reached UNEF Command, I was explaining and defending myself to outraged parties from multiple nations. Perhaps that was the good aspect of me being in such trouble; it had united the five nations of UNEF in collective indignant outrage toward me. Yay, teamwork! My explaining of my decisions lasted four full days; after the first two hours, I learned to stop defending myself and simply accept the ass-chewing. Truthfully, they had raised grilling to such an art that it was kind of a privilege to witness it, even if the person getting grilled was me. By the time they were done, I was burnt so crispy that you wouldn’t have been able to discern me from the charcoal. Assuming, that is, that you understand my ‘grilling’ analogy.

  Skippy attempted to defend me, which I think likely made matters worse. If UNEF Command was disappointed in me, they now thoroughly distrusted our alien AI. In the eyes of UNEF Command, Skippy had stolen a priceless starship from them. Until we returned with our fresh intel, Earth had no way to know for sure that there weren’t a dozen Kristang starships lurking in the vicinity of Earth. Without the troopship’s technology, Earth was completely defenseless. From the viewpoint of UNEF Command, if Skippy could not be trusted to keep a Kristang ship in Earth orbit, how could he be trusted to keep his word and shut down the wormhole near Earth?

  Damn, I had not even considered that issue until we returned. The whole time while we were away on our luxury cruise, UNEF Command had been panicked that the local wormhole was still open, that a fleet of pissed-off aliens would be jumping into Earth orbit without warning. And the best source of advanced alien technology had been jumped out of reach by a clearly untrustworthy alien AI. For all UNEF Command knew, Skippy had sold out the Merry Band of Pirates, and delivered the Dutchman back to the Thuranin in exchange for help from a more-advanced species. People on Earth had been frightened and angry; going home at night to their loved ones and not knowing whether that night was the last for humanity. When we unexpectedly returned, and I proudly and sort of smugly announced that we had again saved the world by foiling an attempt to send a Thuranin ship to Earth, all their fear and anger was transferred to me.

  Hell, I don’t blame them. I’d be angry at that jerk Joe Bishop, if I was them.

  That first night after debriefing, thoroughly exhausted, I collapsed into a bunk. Sleep should have come immediately; to my body clock that was used to Dutchman standard time, it was 0430 and I had been harshly questioned for over fourteen hours. Maybe I was too stunned to sleep. More likely what kept me from sleep was thinking that th
e other Merry Band of Pirates, especially the leaders like Chang, Simms and Smythe, were probably also being subjected to unfriendly interrogation by UNEF. In my debriefing, I had stated many times that decisions during the mission were my responsibility alone. UNEF knew that was what a commander was expected to say.

  “This sucks, Joe,” Skippy commented angrily through my zPhone. “You saved this unworthy ball of dirt, again, and they’re upset with you? Ungrateful jerks.”

  “They’re not ungrateful, Skippy. They did commend me, and the entire crew, for our actions against the surveyor ship.”

  “Yeah, they commended you for like two seconds, before nitpicking and second guessing every freakin’ decision you made along the way.”

  “They do have a point, Skippy. They made me the mission commander, and they gave me only two real objectives.”

  “Which you totally accomplished!”

  “We accomplished the first objective; shutting down the wormhole. The second objective, that is equally important, was preventing aliens from learning that humans are flying around the galaxy in a pirate ship. UNEF Command thinks the major reason that I didn’t manage to blow that objective was through pure luck. Looking back, I think they may be right about that.”

  “Joe, the only decision they have a problem with is landing on Newark, instead of letting the entire crew die aboard the Dutchman when the life support power ran out. Those dumdums forget that if the crew hadn’t landed on Newark, we would never have learned about that surveyor ship’s mission.”