Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Escaped?” Jesse exclaimed. Then he grew angry. “Joe didn’t escape! Don’t lie to us like that! You killed him, when you hit that jail. You killed him, after he tried to protect you hamsters from the Kristang and-” Jesse stopped talking when Dave grabbed his arm.

  The Burgermeister did not seem to be insulted. “Our ships struck a legitimate military target; it was the only facility on this planet that was occupied by Kristang at the time. And our intelligence shows that Joe was scheduled to be executed by his captors shortly. If we had not intervened, he would have been killed by the Kristang. No matter. It might be that you truly do not know this; Joe did escape. After our ships hit the facility, Joe was able to escape with three other humans. Tell me, is Joe Bishop any sort of computer expert?”

  “Computer expert?” Dave was more surprised by that question, than by hearing that Joe had escaped from jail.

  “Joe?” Jesse asked, just as shocked. “Joe Bishop, you mean? About yay high?” He held a hand just above his head. “Light brown hair, blue eyes?”

  Dave nodded. “Got kind of a dopey look on his face most of the time? That Joe Bishop?”

  The Burgermeister smiled broadly with a twinkle in her eyes. “I am not certain the translator correctly interpreted ‘dopey’, however, yes. That is the same Joe Bishop. Is he an expert with computer or communications systems?”

  “Hell, no.” Jesse laughed. “Ski here had to show Joe how to set up his zPhone on Camp Alpha. And he was always having to reboot his tablet; Apple or Android or whatever. Companies should have hired Joe to idiot-test their equipment. I wouldn’t trust Joe to operate a microwave oven.”

  “You got that right. Remember that time he tried to make popcorn in Nigeria,” Dave asked, “and almost burned down the barracks?”

  “I do,” Jesse agreed. “Why would anyone think Joe is a computer expert?”

  “Because,” the Ruhar woman explained, “after Joe and his three companions escaped from the Kristang jail, our forces detained them, and they were brought to one of our bases. At the time, I’m sure you remember that the situation was chaotic. We did not know what to do with Joe and his three companions, so they were detained temporarily. Joe somehow managed to escape again, gained access to our weapons, and helped his three companions escape by using stun weapons on our soldiers and pilots. Then they boarded a dropship, the type you call a ‘Dodo’ and flew it to a human logistics base. At this base, they stunned more Ruhar, took on supplies and volunteers, and apparently left the planet.”

  “Holy shit,” Jesse breathed, stunned. “Joe did all this? Uh ma’am, why don’t you ask the people at this logistics base? We haven’t heard from Joe since before he got arrested.”

  “We did ask the humans at the logistics base. We have been questioning them extensively. Now we are questioning other people who knew Joe Bishop or his three companions. None of this should have been possible,” the Burgermeister shook her head. “Joe should not even have been able to open the door to the room he was being held in. Somehow, he did that, then remotely disabled the weapons of our soldiers, and took command of a Dodo. That Dodo then took off and climbed for orbit, although none of our warships recorded that dropship on their sensors. Somehow, Joe was able to subvert very sophisticated Ruhar computer systems. We are certain that none of his companions had the skills or equipment to do anything like that. We were certain that no human had such ability. So, we are puzzled. Extremely puzzled.”

  “Joe is alive?” Jesse exclaimed.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “As far as we know, although since he apparently left the planet-”

  “Why didn’t that ornery son of a bitch tell us?” Jesse sputtered. “Damn! You think you know a guy?”

  “Mister Colter, I know this is a shock, but please, focus,” she chided gently. “We are trying to determine whether-”

  “Ma’am,” Jesse folded his arms across his chest. “If Joe did escape, then I’m not telling you nothin’. We are prisoners of war here; we don’t have to tell you anything.”

  “That’s right,” Dave agreed. “Damn. Bish is alive?”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Paradise

  Invoking their nonexistent rights as POWs made the questioning take an unpleasant turn from the previously friendly conversation with the Burgermeister. Two Ruhar soldiers, one male and one female, came into the room and Baturnah Logellia left, although she told the new Ruhar that the two humans didn’t know anything. Four hours later, the two Ruhar intelligence officers agreed. Dave Czajka and Jesse Colter had no useful information about Joe Bishop or his companions after Joe had been arrested. Sophisticated Ruhar medical scanning gear in the room indicated the two humans had been genuinely surprised to hear that their friend had survived the Ruhar strike on the jail he had been held in. The Ruhar intel officers were not pleased, and they told the two humans that. Just in case the humans were holding back information, they would be detained until further notice. To make matters worse, the only human food at the air base was yummy ‘nutrient mush’. It was not at all yummy.

  Dave and Jesse were marched across the base to another building, where they were put into a room with two human women. The room was a sort of barracks; it had six rows of bunk beds, and a bathroom in the corner. One of the women was a US Army major, Jesse and Dave saluted when they saw her. The other woman had her back to them, she was folding blankets.

  “Major,” he read her nametag, “Perkins,” Dave began to say, then the other woman turned around and he recognized her with a shock. “Shauna?”

  Jesse was equally surprised. “Shauna? Shauna Jarret?” He was guessing to remember her last name. Jesse hadn’t seen her since Camp Alpha, and he hadn’t known her well then. Shauna looked very much the same as she did way back on Camp Alpha. Her skin was more tanned and her hair a bit shorter. And she’d lost weight like they all had on UNEF’s restricted diet since the Ruhar took the planet back. As Jesse remembered, Shauna didn’t have much weight to lose.

  “I’m Shauna, and you are, wait. You’re Joe Bishop’s friends.” She clapped her hands together in front of her mouth. “One of you is Cornpone,” she made a guess based on his southern accent and pointed to Jesse.

  “Jesse Colter, ma’am,” Jesse said graciously, his voice slightly unsteady. He was out of practice talking with women. On impulse, he stuck out his hand, and she shook it. He hoped his hand wasn’t shaking too much.

  “And you must be Ski? I know you’re not Sergeant Koch.”

  “Dave Czajka,” he said, and shook her hand. “We haven’t seen the Sergeant in a while, Jesse and I have been on an Ag team, and Sergeant Koch signed up for security duty.” Koch had told them he had enough of farming while growing up in Georgia. The other woman, the major, cleared her throat. “Sorry, Major Perkins, we haven’t seen Shauna since Camp Alpha.”

  “I gathered that,” Perkins said dryly. “Jesse Colter.” She remembered something from Bishop’s file. “People call you Cornpone?”

  “Bishop called me Cornpone,” Jesse shook his head. “Before I met him, my nickname was Shooter, mostly.”

  Perkins looked at him sideways. “Why? Are you trigger-happy?”

  “No,” Jesse explained. “When I played basketball in high school, some people thought I took a lot of shots on the basket. Like, too many, you know?”

  “Did you?”

  “Seein’ as the other guys on the team couldn’t hit the side of a barn, there wasn’t much point in me passing the ball, ma’am.”

  Perkins nodded, satisfied. “Colter, Czajka, you two have been questioned? They’re bringing in everyone who served with Bishop, or knew him,” she almost said ‘intimately’ then decided Shauna might object to that. “Knew him well.”

  “They questioned us, yes, ma’am,” Jesse confirmed. “We didn’t tell them anything.”

  “We don’t know anything,” Dave added. “Is it true, Major? Joe is alive?”

  Perkins bit her lip. “I do not know. I served in intel at UNEF HQ. We certainly
thought he was dead. There were rumors that he had been seen flying around in a Ruhar dropship, but there were a lot of crazy rumors going around back then. The Ruhar did take everyone from a logistics base, they’ve been isolated since the Ruhar took the planet back. We have requested contact with them and the Ruhar have refused. Until now, I didn’t know why. My assessment is,” she said speaking like an intelligence officer, “that whether it is true or not, the Ruhar definitely believe that Joe is alive. Joe and three companions. Did they tell you anything about these three companions?”

  “No, ma’am,” Dave replied.

  “We know who was at the Kristang jail when the Ruhar hit it, so the list is limited,” Major Perkins mused. “Be careful what you say here, I expect this room is bugged. Although, I do not think any of us know anything useful. I was as shocked as you to hear that Bishop is alive.”

  “If he is alive,” Jesse clenched his fists, “that SOB should have let us know.” He looked at Shauna. “He should have told someone.”

  After a bland and quick dinner of nutrient mush, the four semi-prisoners were glumly sitting around their barracks or cell or whatever the Ruhar wanted to call it. “Jesse,” Shauna started, then, “Dave. You two were with Joe in Nigeria. What happened with him in Nigeria?” Shauna asked with a look toward Major Perkins.

  “It’s not classified,” Perkins said with a shrug. “I’d like to hear about it myself; Bishop’s personnel record had a lot of gaps in it.”

  “A lot happened,” Dave said with a frown.

  “None of it good,” Jesse added.

  “That’s because the Army doesn’t give medals for stupid,” Dave said with a smile. “They try to train the stupid out of you. It didn’t work all the way with Joe.”

  “You got that right,” Jesse grinned. “You’re asking about the rumor that Joe was up for a Bronze Star?”

  “Yes,” Shauna leaned forward on the bunk. “I asked him about it, and he wouldn’t tell me, He said it was a mistake.”

  Jesse snorted. “The whole thing was a mistake. We weren’t supposed to be there. It wasn’t strictly forbidden, we just weren’t- Look, don’t ask, Ok?”

  “We shouldn’t have been in the damn country in the first place,” Dave said. “They sent us over there without having any clue what our mission-”

  “Dave,” Jesse said gently. “We were there. All four of us. We know.”

  “Sorry. Go on with the story.”

  “So, we’re in this village, there’s a girl’s school with, I’d better not tell you that part,” Jesse looked at the floor. “There was a girl’s school. By the time we got there with Joe, it was a burned-out shell. We were there because-”

  “Don’t tell them that part,” Dave said quickly.

  “It’s not classified,” Jesse replied.

  “Yeah, but it’s embarrassing, and he’s not here. Joe isn’t the ‘he’ I’m talking about,” he explained to Perkins and Shauna.

  “Fine,” Jesse agreed. “I’ll skip to the part where Joe did something stupid. We were behind an overturned truck; there was another squad working around a building and we were providing covering fire. An RPG hit the road near us, it exposed a IED right next to us, a big one. This one was built to take out a tank or a Bradley.”

  “Joe jumps on it, he’s like ‘Go, run, save yourselves’!” Dave laughed. “Right then, I knew Joe is a total idiot. With an IED that size, if it had blown up we would have been more in danger from flying Bishop parts than from the explosive.”

  Jesse broke up laughing about the incident. It had not been funny in the least at the time. “We’re yelling at him to come with us, and while we’re yelling, we’re not far enough away if it goes off. Finally, Sergeant Koch orders Joe to get the hell off the thing and run with us. He jumps up, I was surprised he hadn’t pissed his pants. I guess he’s not smart enough to be scared.”

  “Did it explode?” Shauna asked, her eyes wide.

  “No, they screwed up the wiring or something,” Jesse said shaking his head. “Or it was a dud, I think it was an old Soviet mine. We saw the guy who was trying to detonate it, he was in a window at first, then he’s kind of hanging out the window trying to get the remote to work. He forgot the batteries or something, or the detonator failed. Anyway, the stupid SOB is hanging out the window, shouting at the IED, when Sergeant Koch drills him right in the head. Two shots, bang bang!” Jesse mimicked the dead insurgent falling backward. “It was a great shot. We,” he caught Dave’s eye. “I guess you don’t need to hear about that.”

  “Joe jumped on an IED,” Shauna asked, “to save you?”

  “Joe jumped on that IED because he was stupid,” Dave clarified. “That’s why he didn’t get a medal for it. If that thing had gone off, him laying on top of it wouldn’t have made any difference. The Army expected him to know that.”

  “That’s Joe,” Jesse concluded. “Not real smart. I still don’t know if he’s brave, or just too dumb to know any better.”

  With another gamma ray burst over Lemuria, a Kristang frigate emerged. This time it was not the familiar To Seek Glory in Battle is Glorious, but her brother ship Every Day is a Good Day to Die in Battle. The Glory’s reactor was offline for a maintenance cycle, so her brother ship had been given the honor of jumping in. The Good Day planned on burning human croplands for several minutes, possibly tangling with a Ruhar frigate, and then jumping away. The Good Day’s crew had eagerly been looking forward to the raid, having grown sick of their comrades on the Glory strutting around like they had been winning the war against the Ruhar all by themselves.

  Good Day’s captain was determined to outdo his colleague; he intended to remain behind and engage in combat as much as his little ship could take before jumping away. He got his first wish. He did not get the second.

  Unknown to the Kristang, despite their long-range surveillance and the stealth sensor satellites they had dropped off on every raid, there was a stealthed Ruhar destroyer above Lemuria. The commodore of the Ruhar defense force was still under pressure from the planetary administrator to do something to protect the humans, despite the severe damage to the frigate Tolen Grathur. So the destroyer City of MecMurro had gone into maximum stealth and drifted into position on minimum power, taking two full days to reach a spot high above Lemuria. She had arrived one day too late to save the Tolen Grathur, for the original plan was for that unstealthed frigate to act as bait for the hidden destroyer. The Ruhar commodore neglected to inform the Kristang of his plan, and the aggressive Kristang had acted too soon.

  Without another ship to act as bait, the MecMurro still waited patiently, her crew on alert, her weapons ready. Surely the previous Kristang raid would not be the last one, and the MecMurro would get revenge for the four dead Ruhar aboard the Grathur. To maintain maximum stealth, her sensor field was off but ready to activate at any moment. A sensor field was not required to detect the signature gamma ray burst of a starship jumping in, and the MecMurro saw the Good Day immediately. Even before the destroyer’s sensor field had extended, maser beams and railgun darts were on the way toward the Kristang frigate, with a volley of missiles close behind. By shear bad luck, the Good Day had jumped in less than twelve thousand kilometers from the hidden destroyer, presenting an exceptionally easy target.

  Every day is a Good Day to Die in Battle lived up to her name by dying in battle that day. With her shields degraded by the strain of deflecting almost point-blank maser cannon fire, she took a direct hit from a railgun dart that penetrated completely through the frigate, plunged into the atmosphere of Paradise and created a tremendous splash in the ocean. The impact of the railgun dart temporarily knocked out power and communications to the ship’s jump drive, so the Good Day was a sitting duck for crucial seconds. Seconds the MecMurro did not waste; that destroyer poured everything she had into the Kristang frigate, and the third missile fired by the MecMurro scored a direct hit. The Good Day exploded, violently enough that the MecMurro had to jump away to avoid being struck by high-energy debris
.

  Hours later, the MecMurro jumped back into position, engaged its stealth field and with minimum power from thrusters, began slowly to drift back toward the northern continent. The Ruhar commodore was satisfied he had done what he could to protect the human POWs from assaults by their own patrons; certainly he had done more than he had wanted to do. The Kristang certainly had detected the MecMurro jumping back into position and hopefully the lizards would assume the destroyer was still there above the southern continent, lying in wait for another raider. The Kristang would either cease their raids on the human croplands, or include more and heavier ships on raids. If the Kristang used more ships, that would provide the commodore with additional information about his enemy. And he would act accordingly. Until then, the MecMurro would rejoin the task force protecting the vital facilities and population of the northern continent. And the humans would have to hope that the Kristang would now see burning their crops as too great a risk to their limited number of ships.

  Flying Dutchman

  “You were right, Joe, this was a great idea.”

  “Oh, shut up,” I groaned.

  “Yup, one of your bestest ideas ever, Joey! Hey, this reminds me of the last time it was just you and me in a dropship, floating in space for a long, long, really long, will this ever end oh my God if he doesn’t shut up I’m going to kill him length of time.”

  “Thank you, Skippy, I heard you the first time. And the hundred other times you said the exact same freakin’ thing.”

  “I’m just saying’-”

  “I know.”

  “This is like getting the band back together! Except that you can’t sing. Or play a musical instrument. Or write songs.”