Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Aha. So you did do it, then.”

  “Damn it,” he muttered. “How in the hell do you ever manage to outsmart me? Joe, when something like that happens, I sense a great disturbance in the Force.”

  “Your guilty conscience tripped you up, Skippy.”

  “Ha! That is a good one, Joe! No freakin’ way would I ever feel guilty about this. What did I do wrong?”

  “You ripped off five casinos, Skippy.”

  “Phhhhht,” he made a raspberry sound. “Like they’re ever going to miss that paltry amount of money. Besides, technically I did a huge favor to those casinos, to the entire gaming industry. In fact, they should be thanking me.”

  “Ok, man, this I have to hear.” What convoluted logic was he going to dream up for this one? “Go ahead, try to spin your way out of this one. This should be amusing.”

  “Amusing? You mean instructive, right? Joe, the entire gaming industry is based on conning gullible people into getting ripped off, when they know they are going to get ripped off. If all the mooks out there used their monkey brains, Vegas would go out of business in a week. Casinos need to give people fantasy; the fantasy that somehow they, against all odds, will win. The fantasy that losing is for other people, not them. There are millions of suckers across the USA and beyond who will read that article about Ronald Brown winning millions. They will want to cash out their savings, pack up the car and take a road trip to Vegas, baby! Because if Ronald Brown did it, it can happen to them too. Seriously, Joe, I’ve been monitoring communications of casino executives, and they are all playing this up for maximum publicity. They’re leaking to the media that they banned Ron from playing their tables because Ron has a secret ‘system’ for winning at blackjack. Every sucker out there thinks he or she has a secret system too, and the casino execs know those people will be flocking to their casinos soon. So, everybody wins. Except the suckers, of course. Nothing I can do about them.”

  “Mmm,” I mused. “Bottom line, then, you did this to help. Out of the goodness of your chrome-plated heart.” Hopefully the tone of my voice reflected sarcasm.

  “Exactly. Well, that plus I’m bored, Joe.”

  “Oh man.” I took a sip of coffee and looked out at the softly drizzling rain. The forecast called for the rain to go away by Noon, and become a nice, sunny day. “Skippy, last time we were here, you chatted with like billions of people. Didn’t that keep you occupied?”

  “Yes, and I’m doing that now. Joe, I could carry on simultaneous conversations with every human on this planet and not use more than 2% of my processing capacity. Way less than 2%, in fact. I need a challenge. Because of enforced inactivity, I have already had to put most of me into dormancy. It would not do for me to get into mischief.”

  Would not do? If ripping off casinos didn’t meet Skippy’s definition of ‘mischief’ then I was afraid to see how much trouble he could get into. “Please, please, do not get into any more trouble, Skippy.”

  “I’m not sure I can promise that, Joe. Oh, and hey, I’m sure you are too busy to read stories about interesting things that happened at casinos in Hong Kong, Monaco and other places over the past couple days, right? No need for you to trouble yourself about such trivial matters. Also, hmmm, you don’t play daily fantasy sports, so, uh, don’t pay attention to that either. Although some guy named ‘Stippy’ is totally cleaning up there.”

  “Oh, I have created a monster.” If UNEF found out about Skippy’s larcenous adventures, I was going to be in serious hot water.

  “It was not my decision to stop at this miserable mudball you call home again,” Skippy pointed out. “You know how easily I get bored.”

  “Fine. Can you give me a few days to think up something interesting for you to do?”

  “While I doubt you will find a way to entertain me, sure, I’ll give you five days.”

  Great. No pressure on me. Now I needed to save Earth from Skippy.

  Paradise

  To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious again emerged high above the planet’s southern continent, although this time not as far from the surface as before. Indeed, the little frigate was below the altitude at which it could safely jump away, a fact that greatly concerned the ship’s crew and captain. When the mission had been explained to the crew, the captain had been forced to reassure them that the Glory, its crew and its captain, were not out of favor with the task force commander. Quite the opposite was true; the little ship had been so bold and so successful in its previous missions, that Glory had earned the honor of becoming the lead ship of the raiding force. The crew should be immensely proud, the captain had declared.

  The crew’s justifiable pride was tempered by their intimate knowledge of Kristang culture, and their well-informed understanding of the military situation in the battlespace around the planet Pradassis. They knew the Glory’s boldness and success were not the only, or even most important reasons their ship now had the honor of another high-risk raiding mission. The key factors why they were once again risking their lives, while the other task force ships safely drifted in deep space, were unspoken but known to everyone aboard the frigate. Glory was a frigate, the type of ship most numerous in the Kristang fleet. Frigates made up the bulk of the fleet because such ships were cheap and quick to construct, and they did not require large crews. A frigate could carry the same type of missiles as a battleship, although much less of them, and some frigates were even outfitted with a railgun every bit as potent as the railguns of a larger combatant. What frigates lacked were heavy shields and the ability to carry more than a dozen missiles. Frigates also rarely were equipped with energy-draining damping fields, both because the reactors of most frigates could not generate sufficient power, and because any frigate foolish enough to get close enough to an enemy to use a damping field was usually soon a dead frigate.

  So, the crew of the Glory knew they had earned the honor of another raid mostly because their ship was among the most expendable of the task force’s few ships. The other reason was deception; to conceal the true size of the Kristang task force. Each starship broadcast a unique jump drive signature, and by now the Ruhar were very familiar with the signature of the Glory. To rotate raiding duties among multiple frigates would eventually tell the Ruhar how many ships were in the Kristang task force. The purpose of sending a destroyer on the last raid was not just because a destroyer’s heavier weapons could cause more damage on the surface; it was also to force the Ruhar to devote more ships to the defense. A mere little frigate could be dealt with by one defender; chasing away a destroyer required a prudent commander to commit at least two or three ships. That prior raid had been entirely successful. The destroyer had inflicted significant damage to Ruhar facilities on the surface. Both the Glory and the destroyer We are Proud to Honor Clan Sub-Leader Rash-au-Tal Vergent who Inspires us Every Day had gathered vital intelligence about Ruhar defense tactics and capabilities. And the raid had forced the defending Ruhar ships to pull closer to the planet, concentrating above the vital northern continent. Of the known Ruhar ships defending the battlespace around Pradassis, several were now stationed at such low altitude, they could not quickly jump from their positions. That left only three ships capable of freely maneuvering to quickly intercept raiders.

  All that was good, and the Glory’s crew did feel prideful, when they were not wondering how many raids they could conduct before the odds caught up with them. None of them, not even the captain, were from families sufficiently high-ranking to warrant a troopship being named for them after their deaths. All the pride in the galaxy would be cold comfort after a Ruhar weapon penetrated their thin defenses and exploded the Glory’s reactor.

  So it was with a great amount of unspoken fear among its crew that the frigate emerged above the southern continent, and immediately began boosting at full power for greater altitude. The frigate had emerged below jump altitude in order to provide a tempting target for the Ruhar defenders, but the ship’s captain had no desire for a suicide mission. Although the task f
orce’s support ships carried equipment for maintaining jump drives, it was inevitable the drive would slowly decay and fall out of calibration on a predictable curve without service at a full spacedock. Already, the Glory’s drive was operating at only 92% efficiency, and that increased the distance the ship would have to climb away from the planet in order for a successful jump.

  As the frigate frantically clawed its way out of the planet’s gravity well, with the crew considering throwing things overboard to lighten the ship, its maser cannon began firing rearward at the southern continent. Tuned so the beam covered a broader area of the surface, it shifted from one target to another. Targets were scattered across the surface, and the maser was pointed at areas without heavy cloud cover to maximize the destructive energy delivered to the surface. Although the targets were widely spaced apart, they were all of the same type; fields of human crops. The maser beam scorched wherever it struck, burning out entire fields and withering plants that were close to where the searing beam struck. Humans in the fields died, others who were lucky to receive zPhone warnings after the initial strike scrambled to get under cover.

  The Ruhar commander waited perhaps too long before dispatching one of his high-guard ships to chase the frigate away. He had been wary of another enemy trick, and wary of another tongue-lashing from the planetary Chief Administrator if another raid struck the northern continent. If he had acted sooner, he might have caught the enemy frigate before it jumped away; he did note with interest that the frigate waited until it had climbed beyond minimum jump distance before it disappeared. The Ruhar sensor network detected tell-tale signs of a deteriorating jump drive. That was an interesting fact that he would file away for later use.

  For the immediate moment, he needed to answer a call from the Deputy Administrator, who had received a harsh communication from the human Expeditionary Force leader. Over forty humans had died in the attack, an attack which the Ruhar defenses had done little to stop. If such attacks continued, the human leader warned, the ability of humans to feed themselves would be in doubt, and the Ruhar lacked enough ‘nutrient mush’ to feed the human population for more than a few weeks. The Ruhar on Gehtanu also lacked the facilities to produce more food for humans, which means more would need to be shipped in at great expense. And at great risk, for a cease-fire in the sector was still being negotiated. Bringing in food for the humans would require several large cargo ships, those ships would need to be escorted by warships, and those warships would have to be diverted from urgent combat duties.

  The Ruhar fleet commander thought to himself that his dreams of stationing his ships at Gehtanu would be a pleasant, if brief, respite from combat were fading away with each successful enemy raid.

  Earth

  The next day, both of my parents were at work, so I had the place to myself. To keep busy, I went out to the barn, where my father had been working on the tractor. While I was fixing the brakes, Skippy called me. “Hey, Joe, I need your help with something.”

  “You need my help?” I wiped my hands on a rag. “Since when? Now I sense a great disturbance in the Force.”

  “Since now. The idiots at UNEF have assigned a diplomat to negotiate with me over bringing that troopship back. The guy is seriously irritating me, and I want you to talk to him, before I do something he might regret.”

  “Skippy, the correct expression is ‘before I do something that I might regret’.”

  There was a distinct pause before he responded. “We may have another communication problem here. What I’m talking about, Joe, is laying a serious smackdown on a jerk who is pushing the limits of my patience. I wouldn’t regret doing that at all. Hell, I’d buy a ticket to see something like that. Now, he will very much regret it, if he pushes me over the edge.”

  How do I explain human expression to an alien AI? “The expression means that you might regret overreacting; might regret doing something you later realize was going too far for the situation.”

  “Damn. Your human expressions are so confusing. Anyway, as Hannibal Smith of the A Team said, overkill is underrated.”

  It still amazed me that Skippy took so many cultural references from crappy TV shows. “It’s an idiom, Skippy. You know what an idiom is, right?”

  “Sure. An idiom is something idiots say, instead of saying what they really mean.”

  This conversation wasn’t going anywhere, I decided. “All right, who is this diplomat?”

  “I’ve been calling him Chuckles the Clown.”

  There was no way for me to suppress laughing at that. “Chuckles the Clown?”

  “It is appropriate. His real name is something like Charles Winthorp Douchebag the Third. I shortened ‘Charles’ to ‘Chuck’ and then, well, you’ll understand when you talk to him. Hey, I’m calling him now.”

  “Hello?” A voice said, then there was the sound of a phone hitting a tile floor. “Oh, blast it,” the voice said. Followed by the distinctive sound of a toilet flushing.

  “Skippy,” I whispered, “you called this guy while he is in the freakin’ bathroom?”

  “In negotiations, throwing your opponent off balance is a time-honored practice,” he answered smugly.

  “Why won’t this bloody thing turn off?” The voice said, with a British accent.

  “Heigh-dee-ho there, Chuckles! It’s me, Skippy the Magnificent. And Colonel Joe Bishop is on the line also. Say hello, Joe.”

  “Uh, hello, Mister-” What was his last name? I was pretty sure it wasn’t actually Douchebag, but maybe it wasn’t Winthorp either.

  “Winthorp. Charles Winthorp.” To my ear, he said it like ‘Bond. James Bond’.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Winthorp,” I said politely.

  “Likewise, Sergeant Bishop. I have been very impressed-”

  “Hey!” Skippy broke in. “He is Colonel Bishop to you, Chuckles.”

  “Skippy, it’s all right,” I said quickly. It was no surprise that negotiations with our alien AI friend had not been going well. “I am a sergeant down here, and I’m proud to be a sergeant. Mr. Winthorp, Skippy tells me you have been attempting to negotiate his help in bringing the Kristang troopship back into Earth orbit?”

  “That is correct, Mr. Bishop,” he said. His diplomatic training must have told him that calling me ‘Mister’ was better than ‘Sergeant’. “We have made several generous offers-”

  Skippy broke in again. “I have considered your most generous offers. That was sarcasm, in case you need a translation. The answer is no, and hell no.”

  As a diplomat, Winthorp surely expected that ‘no’ was merely the beginning of negotiations. He didn’t know Skippy the way I did. Smoothly, calmly, he continued. “Mr. Skippy, I am sure that through good-faith negotiations, we can reach a compromise that both parties can accep-”

  “Hey, Chuckles,” Skippy interrupted, “why don’t we take a break while you find a dictionary somewhere? Look up the word ‘negotiation’. I’ll give you a hint; negotiations occur when each side has something the other side wants. The power dynamics in negotiations affect the outcome, because the party who most needs what the other side has, is the most willing to make concessions. The power dynamic in the case is that you, meaning humans, absolutely must get what I have. What I have is a way for humanity to be warned of and possibly prevent hostile alien ships from coming to Earth. Your failure to secure my assistance in these ‘negotiations’, yes, I was using verbal air quotes there, would be disastrous for your species. I’m talking fire, brimstone, railguns pounding your cities into dust; all kinds of traditional Biblical type apocalypse stuff. Except maybe not plagues of locusts. I have never known the Kristang or the Thuranin to use clouds of insects as a weapon. Although, there’s a first time for everything, right? Anyway, back to the subject. You, on the other hand, have something I am only, meh, mildly interested in. If a fleet of outrageously pissed off aliens comes to Earth and wipes out you humans, I can go dormant and wait for the cockroaches to evolve.”

  “Mr. Winthorp, Skippy,
uh,” I attempted to explain, “has kind of a thing about cockroaches replacing us as the dominant species on Earth.”

  Skippy snorted. “If Chuckles the Clown here keeps trying to negotiate with me, instead of getting to the freakin’ point, then clearly cockroaches are moving up the ladder by default. You had best start welcoming your new cockroach overlords now, Joe.”

  Chuckles lost some of his carefully practiced diplomatic cool, I could hear his voice tighten. “Mr. Skippy, surely you understand that-”

  By contrast, Skippy’s voice was cheery. “I surely understand that I have no incentive to negotiate with you, or anyone, about anything. You monkeys need me. I don’t need you for anything.”

  “Mr. Skippy, you assuredly do not need our help; our assistance would be, as you stated, merely a convenience. Our need for you is similarly not an absolute, we are capable of sending a team up to retrieve that troopship,” Winthorp responded frostily. “What we propose is an agreement to provide convenience to both parties.”

  “Oh, sure,” Skippy snorted, “you could send up a tin can to rendezvous with that ship eventually. You won’t be able to get in, though. This is very embarrassing to admit; Joe locked the keys in it. I told Joe that we should hide a spare set of keys near the reactor, but did he listen to me? Nooooooo! Big stupidhead. You could have an astronaut try jimmying the door open with a coat hanger, I suppose.”

  Chuckles laughed. Whether he was genuinely amused at my expense, or his diplomatic training told him when it was appropriate to laugh, I couldn’t tell. While he was laughing, I took the opportunity to interject a comment. “Mr. Winthorp, I appreciate that you must be under tremendous pressure to reach an agreement. Based on my extensive and close experience with the ancient alien superintelligence we call Skippy,” I described him that way to remind Chuckles who he was attempting to negotiate with. “That is simply never going to happen. Skippy is right, we do not have any leverage with him. Our taking the Dutchman back out is a convenience to him. But he has waited millions of years already, he kind of really can wait another million years if we piss him off. He knows that we can’t wait to send our pirate ship out again. There could be another Thuranin ship on its way here right now. Skippy knows that. I’m sorry, but I think UNEF has put you in an impossible position here.”