“Goddamn lizards killed him,” Dave frowned.
“I think technically, the hamsters killed him when they blew up that jail he was in.”
“Bullshit, Jesse. That was timing, the lizards were going to kill him anyway. The reason he is dead is because of the lizards.”
“Yeah,” Cornpone agreed with a frown.
“Yeah. I miss his stupid face sometimes.”
“Bish, a colonel,” Jesse shook his head in amazement. “He was one lucky son of a bitch. Until, you know, he got killed.”
Flying Dutchman
Following the initial jump, the ship was recharging jump drive capacitors, so I took the opportunity to get dinner. It had been a long day and I was on the third and last shift for dinner in the galley; hopefully not all the good stuff was gone by then. It was the Chinese team’s turn to cook and to my surprise, they made meatloaf. There were also two vegetarian dishes. Chinese meatloaf? The cook offered it to me with pride, so I took the plate and added some sort of vegetables. On our last mission, someone on the American team had added nutmeg to the meatloaf, so I tasted this Chinese version with skepticism. It was delicious. Different but delicious, and spicy. The meatloaf on my plate was gone before I knew it. The cook, beaming with pride, offered me a second helping, which I accepted.
“Hey, Colonel Joe,” Skippy said through the ceiling speaker, “I need a favor.”
Mentally I cringed, because Skippy had often used my time in the galley to tease and insult me in front of an audience. “What is it?”
“I need you to order Dr. Friedlander to tell me the punchline to the joke he started. That freakin’ weasel keeps telling me that he’s too busy managing the science team.”
“I won’t order him to tell you, but I can certainly ask him about it. Maybe I can help you, what is the joke?”
“He said ‘How do you keep an idiot in suspense’?”
Thank God that I didn’t have a mouthful of food, because I burst out laughing and so did everyone in the galley. Sergeant Adams was laughing so hard she had tears running down her face. Captain Giraud almost fell off his chair.
“What’s so funny?” Skippy demanded.
When I could talk again, I said gently “Skippy, think about it.”
After a long pause, there came “Oh. Shit.” Then he shouted “Friedlander! Joe, we need the ship to alter course immediately.”
“Why?”
“There is a planet I know of that has large beasts sort of like dinosaurs. We’re going to dip Friedlander in ketchup and drop him off there.”
“Skippy, come on. I promised the guy that he would not be eaten by a giant space lizard.”
“You promised him, I didn’t. Ooooooh, that weasel is going to seriously regret the day he was born when-”
“Thank you for the laugh, Skippy. I’m sure you can find some non-lethal means to get even with our local rocket scientist.”
The third morning after we jumped away from Earth, I had a problem to deal with. Count Chocula came to my office, before I even had a sip of coffee. He complained he didn’t get any sleep that night, because his cabin was alternately broiling hot then freezing cold at night, and the ventilation system made booming noises. He asked me to tell Skippy to stop harassing him, then he went away to get the cup of coffee I hadn’t had yet.
As soon as he went around the corner, I called a shiny beer can that I know. “Hey, Skippy, Count Chocula says the ventilation in his cabin went haywire last night?”
“Oh, uh huh, yeah, I heard about that. It’s a damned shame, is what it is. The ventilation system in that area has issues.”
“Issues?”
“Yup. Multiple issues, let me tell you. The ventilation system’s sister is dating some creepy Goth guy, it’s mother lost her job and is drinking too much, again. The whole family is worried. Although, let’s face it, the mother has been through rehab twice already so it’s no surprise. She’s not going to change. And the ventilation system itself is having a bad hair day, plus it gained weight after it broke up with its boyfriend last week. Oh, man, it’s a whole deal. We’re talking daytime TV type drama in that family.”
“Ooookay, sure,” I couldn’t help laughing. “Any chance you can fix just one issue, keep the temperature in that cabin at a comfortable level?”
“I could, I suppose. Tell you what, I’ll put it on my list of things to do. Although there are so many other things I need to do that are a much higher priority.”
“Such as?”
“Well, Joe, your sock drawer is shockingly disorganized. You’ve got dress socks mixed up with sport socks, man, it could take me months to untangle that mess. The ventilation system in his cabin may have to wait a while.”
“Listen, Skippy. I don’t like the jerk either,” I craned my neck to see if anyone was in the corridor outside my office, “but you can’t harass him that way. He needs sleep. Lack of sleep won’t improve his personality.”
“You have a point there, Joe. Until I get the ventilation system fixed, I suggest he finds a nice airlock to sleep in. Although, we’ve had trouble with airlocks also, it is possible there could be a catastrophic failure someday. I can’t promise anything.”
“Then tell me this, genius. What are the odds of an airlock failing while Chocula happens to be sleeping there, and him getting sucked out into space?”
“Difficult to say for certain, Joe. There are a lot of variables involved. I can tell you that there does seem to be an odd correlation between the potential of an airlock failure, and how much I am irritated at Chotek that particular day. It is a strange coincidence. I can’t explain it; this could take some detailed analysis.”
I sighed. This was going to be an ongoing problem. “Please, Skippy, for me, let the guy get a good night of sleep, Ok?”
“Fine,” he huffed. “Have it your way. I’ll find some other way to have fun.”
“Great. Don’t make it so obvious next time.”
Fort Rakovsky, Lemuria, Paradise
Their private wheat field was coming along just fine, according to the Ag expert who stopped by their village once a week. Jesse and Dave were discussing combining forces with another three guys to expand their wheat field. Five guys working together could grow more than two plus three working separately. People were doing that all over Lemuria; the crops growing in their allotted private fields were now almost equal to the yield from official communal fields.
Dave had originally wanted to grow oats, figuring it would be an advantage to grow something not many other people were growing. The Ag expert had shot down that idea, explaining that oats were a cool season crop, unsuited to growing in the tropical jungle of Paradise’s southern continent, because the oat plant goes dormant in high temperatures. That was too bad, because Dave had been hoping for a nice bowl of oatmeal someday. Back on Earth, oatmeal had not been his favorite food, but he was fixated on now. Of all the wide variety of foods he missed, a bowl of oatmeal seemed reasonably achievable. Unlike, for example, pepperoni pizza. Why waste time and effort yearning for something he was never, ever going to have again?
Jesse wanted to expand their private field to grow some corn of their own in addition to wheat, intending to someday produce grits. Grits, Jesse said, would be a big seller. Dave supposed Jesse was right about that, but he still was feeling nostalgic about a bowl of oatmeal, like his mother used to make on cold winter mornings in Milwaukee. To make the experience complete, he needed milk, which was not as scarce on Paradise as it used to be now that cows were producing high yields. Rumor had it that their own village would be getting a cow soon, in exchange for two dozen egg-laying chickens.
Dave also needed brown sugar. Sugarcane was being grown on Paradise, and their friendly local Ag expert had told Dave the sugarcane was growing well, very well. It would not be too long, another month perhaps, before human-produced sugar was available. Dave envied the guys who were growing sugarcane; those guys could command anything in trade for sugar, if they were smart enough to grow some sugarcane on th
eir private fields. In fact, Dave had thought of trying to grow sugarcane with Jesse, instead of wheat. Unfortunately, they had learned that processing the cane into sugar was so very labor and energy intensive, it was not worth doing in small-scale operation. Someday, maybe, someday in the future.
So, Dave’s theoretical bowl of oatmeal, a bowl of nostalgia, could have milk and sugar on Paradise. What he lacked were oats. If there were any oats on Paradise, they were in a UNEF warehouse, and that food was carefully guarded. Unless the hamsters allowed humans to grow food in temperate areas of the northern continent, he was not getting any oats within his lifetime. However long that was.
Flying Dutchman
“Skippy, we need to decide how we’re going to find out what the Thuranin know about that surveyor ship we destroyed.” Before we left Earth, many plans had been discussed, but no final decision had been made, of course. UNEF Command wanted Chotek, with my advice, to make the call. “I do not like the idea of us having to assault a Thuranin data relay station, it is too risky. The science team suggested-”
“The science team? Let me guess. They have some moronic idea about me magically retrieving the vital information we need. Probably they expect me to stealthily zoom past some random Thuranin ship and glean what we need from the databanks in like two seconds.”
“No-” My interruption was ignored. He was on a roll so I let him talk.
“As I explained like a hundred freakin’ times already, that won’t work. The reason I was able to quickly get the data we needed from that Thuranin tanker ship on our last mission, is because I knew the coordinates for rendezvous with the surveyor ship would be in the tanker’s navigation computer. I knew exactly where to look and what to look for, and the data was only concealed behind low-level encryption. The rendezvous coordinates may as well have been in a folder marked ‘Skippy look here’.” He paused. “Joe, you’re not going to interrupt me with an unhelpful comment?”
“No, Skippy, I can tell you’re on a roll. Go ahead.”
“Oh. This is unexpected. I don’t know what to say. Darn it. I had several snappy comebacks prepared and now I can’t use them. Well, I’ll save them for later. Uh, what is the science team’s suggestion? Dr. Friedlander and I have had several conversations, during which I shot down many, many idiotic plans they dreamed up.”
“The idea I want to ask is about is whether you could, as you say, magically fly by a random Thuranin ship. Only instead of you trying to find the data we need in a few seconds, you use that time to load a virus or worm or whatever you call it into the ship’s computer. That worm would propagate from ship to ship, looking for the data we need. When the worm has it, it would cause ships to drop flight recorder drones at a couple coordinates in deep space. The Dutchman could then go to one of those coordinates and pick up the data whenever we want.”
“I agree that is a great concept, and I congratulated the science team for thinking up a clever idea. Clever, but unworkable. When I flew by that tanker, I did upload a program which caused that ship to drop off flight recorder drones every time, before the ship jumped. The reason that worked is because my program was only resident in the tanker’s computer for a short time because, you know, we blew up that ship soon after. The AIs aboard Thuranin ships do not compare to me in any way, but they also are not stupid. Because my program altered the normal operation of the ship, the ship’s AI would have detected it eventually, probably within a week to twelve days. A program which only sat quietly looking for data would be able to conceal itself longer. So, the problem with the science team’s clever idea is that such a program would work for a while, then the Thuranin would detect it. They would then not only erase the program from any infected ship, they would analyze the program to determine its purpose. What would happen then is they would likely figure out that the program was designed to drop off drones at specific coordinates, and they would surround each of those coordinates with a heavy battlegroup. The Flying Dutchman would jump in, be trapped by a damping field, and we would be destroyed.”
“Crap.”
“Joe, if there was an easy solution, I would have told you. Besides, it’s your job to dream up crazy, out of the box monkey-brained ideas. You mean to tell me you haven’t thought of an easy way to do this?”
“No,” I admitted.
“I am disappointed in you, Joe.”
“Skippy, I can’t make ideas happen whenever I want. They just do. Or don’t in this case.”
“Then we have to do it the hard way,” Skippy said with a touch of sadness. “The only way to be sure we will find the data we need, is to access the communications files of a Thuranin data relay station. Because those stations transmit powerful signals, they are heavily shielded, so even I can’t access the files from the outside. I need to get inside, and that means we need to physically assault, board and take control of a station. Joe, I fear there will be many casualties among our brave special forces.”
“Me too, Skippy. Me too.” Major Smythe’s SpecOps team leaders had been analyzing the three most common types of Thuranin data relay stations, trying to find a way in that would not lead to a certain slaughter of our forces. So far, they were not confident.
“It has to be a data relay station? We can’t take over a Thuranin ship? Maybe a soft target like a civilian transport?”
“No, Joe, I am sorry. If that were possible, I would have mentioned it as an option. Because the Thuranin have been hit so badly by the Jeraptha in this sector, there is little Thuranin civilian traffic. What few civilian ships that are flying always have military escorts. And a civilian ship is unlikely to carry classified military data. Before you ask, I did consider us somehow capturing a small warship such as a frigate, how to do that would be your problem. That idea I quickly discarded, because there is no way to know beforehand whether any particular ship contains the data we are seeking. That ship might not have access to classified data, or that ship might belong to a battlegroup that had not yet been informed about the surveyor ship. Or the Thuranin may still be puzzling over the fate of the surveyor ship, and may not have informed the fleet about it. We might take a significant risk to capture a ship that doesn’t have any useful data for us. Then we would have to keep capturing one ship after another. No, that won’t work at all. We can’t go randomly capturing ships, hoping they contain the data we need. We need the data to come to us. We need to seize a data relay station.”
Skippy had explained to UNEF Command that because the Thuranin didn’t have faster than light communications, they needed starships to carry message traffic from one star system to another, or between battlegroups of their far-flung fleet. To facilitate regular communications, the Thuranin had built space stations as data relays and scattered them throughout their territory. Most of the relay stations were in heavily trafficked star lanes; often located near clusters of wormholes. Unless ships were on especially urgent or clandestine missions, they were expected to jump in near a relay station and exchange data. A place where Thuranin ships regularly visited would be a tempting target for the Jeraptha, but the Jeraptha weren’t interested in attacking the stations, only the warships that visited such stations. Destroying a relay station would be counterproductive for the Jeraptha; Thuranin warships wouldn’t have a reason to make themselves temporarily vulnerable by stopping there. Accordingly, although most Thuranin relay stations were equipped with heavy armor and shields, they were very rarely attacked.
Once we boarded a relay station and took control, Skippy could ransack their data files at leisure to find the data we needed. Even better, he could erase the resident AI and replace it with a submind of his own. Then, if the station did not already contain all the data we needed when we arrived, we could abandon the station, leave the submind in place and back the Dutchman away. Thuranin ships would fly by, exchanging data, never knowing the station was under human control. When the submind received the data we needed, it would ping us. Even after we got that data, we could leave the submind in place, periodicall
y jumping back in so Skippy could ransack any new files. The relay station would be like humanity having a direct tap into the enemy’s data network. And we could keep it until that station was scheduled to rotate crews; at which point there would be an unfortunate and fatal accident with its reactor.
Skippy hoped the Thuranin had purchased insurance.
The problem for Major Smythe and me was to select one particular relay station to target for assault. Skippy had extensive data on all the Thuranin relay stations; it was up to Smythe and me to choose one to hit. We, mostly Smythe, had developed three criteria for selecting a target.
First, we needed a relay station that didn’t have too much traffic, because we could not have Thuranin ships jumping into exchange data during our assault, and for at least a couple days later. Skippy needed time to load his submind into the Thuranin computer, which he expected to be typically crappy and inadequate. And we would need time to make cosmetic repairs to the exterior of the station, to avoid visiting Thuranin ships from asking awkward questions.
Second, the relay station needed to be of a particular type. Of the three standard Thuranin designs for relay stations, Smythe and his team had quickly rejected two types as being too large, staffed with too many little green men, and having extensive internal defenses. These two types of relay stations tended to be older, from when their Thuranin designers had been worried about defending against Jeraptha attempts to board and capture a station. In the past several hundred years, as it became clear the Thuranin had no interest in boarding what was basically a radio floating in deep space, the Thuranin had begun building a new design. This newer type of station was significantly smaller and required a much smaller crew. The designers had basically taken obsolete cruisers, removed the engines, added shielding to protect the crew from the powerful transmissions, and made a few more tweaks to create a cheap and simple relay station. This type of station did not have the internal armor and killing zones that could trap our special forces as they attempted to force their way to capture the station’s core, where the AI resided.
Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3) Page 13