Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Skippy?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m mortal,” I reminded our friendly alien AI. “I can leave my helmet off, force the airlock doors open, and embrace the sweet, sweet release of death. You, on the other hand, would be stuck right here in interstellar space until the end of time.”

  “Hey, with the door open, it wouldn’t smell like fermented monkey butt in here, so go for it.”

  Leaning forward, I banged my forehead on the dropship’s pilot console. “Worst. Idea. Ever.” I mumbled.

  “When did you realize that, Joe?”

  “Let me think. Uh, it was seventeen days ago.”

  “We’ve only been here seventeen days, Joe.”

  “Exactly.” Me, in a dropship, with only two companions. Skippy, and a tactical nuclear warhead. Between the two, I was beginning to prefer the company of Nukey, as I called it. According to the United States Air Force, Nukey had a variable yield of between 3 and 20 kilotons. Figuring that if I was going to nuke something I might as well go big, I had cranked up the dial to ‘20’. Nukey didn’t say much, it just sat there strapped in behind the copilot seat, emitting neutrons every once in a while. Nukey was the strong, silent type.

  Skippy, on the other hand, could not shut up. We had run out of things to talk about after the first, oh, hour, but that hadn’t stopped him. He had cheerily driven me crazy for seventeen days, and he had an unending supply of nothing to talk about. As one example, I was now well educated about how 17th century Hungarian poetry was influenced by the-

  Oh, damn it, I hadn’t been paying enough attention when Skippy told me the first two or three times. So, tragically, I had no idea what had influenced the Hungarian poets of the 17th century. Some kind of alcohol, I expect. And, given that they were poets, hunger and poverty were likely in the mix also. By day three, I had been praying please, please God do not allow Skippy to give me a pop quiz on any of the boring trivia he had told me. If I failed a quiz, which I would, Skippy would simply start at the beginning and repeat everything.

  That incredibly annoying little beer can was sitting securely strapped into the copilot seat. Aboard the Flying Dutchman, he spent all his time in an escape pod, so I only saw him once or twice a day when I stopped by to visit. Skippy always told me that physical proximity was meaningless and unnecessary, but I think he appreciated that I took the time to sit with him. Now I had seen him constantly for seventeen days, and it reminded me how small, alone and in many ways helpless our friendly ancient alien AI was. He looked cute sitting there, glowing a soft blue when he was happy, red when he was angry, or any combination of colors that he did for my benefit. Skippy looked especially cute because he was wearing a tiny Red Sox home jersey and baseball cap that day. Before we left the ship, Major Simms had handed me a box, with instructions not to open it until the dropship was on station near the wormhole.

  It was a box containing dozens of tiny outfits for Skippy! I do not know where Simms got the idea, but she totally made my day when I opened that box. Day after boring day waiting in the dropship, there were only three things I had to look forward to. Sleeping that night, when Skippy finally shut up. Doing zero-gee exercises as best I could, using rubber bands. And dressing Skippy in a new outfit around mid-morning each day.

  “All right, Skippy, it’s time to change your clothes,” I decided. It was only 0835, but there wasn’t anything else to do. Besides, while I was eating breakfast that morning, Skippy had threatened to spend most of the day educating me on the structural, spiritual and functional differences between pyramids in Egypt and those in Mesoamerica. All I knew was, the pyramids in what is now Mexico are bigger. If he was going to bore me, I would strike first by humiliating him. “Let’s see,” I said looking in the box. “How about a cowboy getup today?”

  “No!”

  “Look at this, Skippy,” I said, holding up the pieces of clothing. “There’s this shirt with a leather vest, and even a gold star, I guess this is for a sheriff or deputy. Aha! And a tiny black curly mustache,” I picked up the mustache and applied it to Skippy between his baseball jersey and hat.

  “NO! Get that ridiculous mustache off of me right now! Major Simms is totally on my ‘Skippy hates this’ list.”

  “Oooh, and a cute little Stetson hat for you, cowpoke.”

  “NO! Oh, I swear if you put that silly cowboy hat on my lid I’m going to light off that nuke right n- Head’s up, Joe, a ship jumped in!”

  “Oh, thank God.”

  “My thoughts exactly. And don’t jinx it this time, you big stupidhead.”

  “All I said was that I hoped the last ship was the right one,” I protested.

  “Yes, and the universe heard you, and because the universe hates you, it was the wrong ship. Again. I’m the one who suffers, being stuck in this cramped dropship with you day after day.”

  “You? Hell, I have to listen to your boring trivia-”

  “And I have to agonize over how to explain the simplest of concepts to-”

  “Skippy?”

  “What?”

  “The alien ship?”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry, I forgot. What were we- Oh, that’s right. Hmmm. Looking good, Joe! It is looking good. This could be the one.”

  After seventeen days stuck in close quarters with Skippy, if the ship that had just jumped in was not a good candidate, I was ready to give up and go back to the Dutchman for a break. Or set off the nuke just for entertainment. Either way would be fine with me. Damn that little beer can could be annoying. Skippy had originally calculated that, in order to have a fifty percent chance of contacting the right Thuranin ship, we would have to park our little dropship near a wormhole entrance for sixty eight days. When he told me that, I was ready to appeal the decision to the statistics referees of the universe. The idea of being stuck in a dropship for one single freakin’ day, with just Skippy and Nukey for company, was bad enough. After seventeen days, during which we had encountered Thuranin ships three times, and none of them had been the type of ship we were looking for, I was ready to kill him. Or myself. Hopefully both. No way was I getting my hopes up, until Skippy was a hundred percent sure this ship was the one we had been seeking. “Could be?”

  “Verifying now,” he said with the flat, emotionless tone that indicated he was concentrating on something. We had several criteria for a candidate ship. It had to be a Thuranin warship; support or civilian ships would likely not have access to the classified fleet deployment and relay station crew rotation schedules that we needed. The ship needed to be going through the wormhole that our dropship was parked near. And the ship had to be planning to contact one of the three data relay stations in the area. Oh, and incidentally, the ideal ship would be alone, or at least not part of a full battlegroup.

  “Good to go, Joe! We are good to go. These ships are perfect.”

  “These ships. I see a heavy cruiser and two destroyers,” I said fearfully. A squadron of Thuranin destroyers had ambushed and very nearly vaporized our pirate star carrier. This time, there was a heavy cruiser with the two destroyers.

  “Phbbbbt,” Skippy made a raspberry sound. “Please, Joe. This is no problemo for us. The destroyers are flying combat space patrol for that cruiser; they are far enough way that there is no way they could detect us.”

  “Are you sure about-” Right then I saw the flaw in Simms’ idea to dress Skippy in cute little outfits; it was hard for me to take him seriously while he was wearing a Red Sox jersey and hat. And a tiny mustache. It was good those ships jumped in before I had time to put the tiny cowboy outfit on him. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Joe, I calculate the additional mission risk posed by those destroyers as one third of one percent. Less than that, if you want me to get more detailed than ‘meh’ level math.”

  “No, please don’t. Please.”

  “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Well, get moving, dumdum. You’re flying this thing.”

  I shook myself back to focus, and gen
tly started the dropship toward the Thuranin heavy cruiser. Heavy cruiser. Heavy, like, it had really big railguns and maser cannons. The particle cannons that ship used just to zap hazardous space debris out of its way could blast us into subatomic particles.

  Damn, that ship was big. With us in super stealth mode, I couldn’t look out the cockpit window; all the photons headed toward our dropship were bent by the stealth field and curved right around the hull. I adjusted the cockpit display to show me the tiny bits of data that Skippy was allowing inside the stealth field, and I compared the size of the heavy cruiser to our dropship. The dropship wasn’t even a dot on the display. Sure, our pirate star carrier was larger than a heavy cruiser; before Skippy shrunk our ship. But star carriers were immensely long and slender, while the cruiser was bulky. I had to remind myself that on long missions, star carriers transported and entire battlegroup of destroyers, cruisers and even battleships.

  I also had to remind myself that star carriers were not combatant ships; the weapons, shields and sensors aboard that heavy cruiser vastly outclassed those aboard our pirate ship. Skippy assured me that with him feeding bullshit data to the cruiser’s sensors, all they would see inside our dropship were two little green Thuranin cyborgs. They would not see an ancient alien AI wearing a baseball uniform and a mustache. They would not see a low-yield nuclear weapon that had ‘Adios MFers’ written on the side of it. Also our nuke had a smiley face drawn on it. And a Hello Kitty sticker. Most importantly they would not see a human.

  No matter; I had promised Chotek that if the Thuranin suspected our dropship wasn’t being flown by Thuranin, I would set off the nuke without hesitation. After seventeen days with Skippy, part of me was praying for us to be discovered.

  Seventeen minutes later, an ironic number, we got close enough to the heavy cruiser for Skippy to do his thing. “Busy,” he said tersely. I knew not to bother him. Lightly touching his shiny surface confirmed that he was slightly warm. “Oh, shit, they detected us. Damn it! I was like 80% done. Dropping the stealth field now.”

  Dropping our stealth field, close to a Thuranin heavy cruiser, might not sound like a good idea. Or a sane idea. It was actually part of my plan; the plan I had sold to Chotek and Chang and Simms and Smythe. And Skippy. “Are they buying your line of bullshit?” I asked anxiously.

  “Hook, line and sinker, Joe. It is working like a charm. Which, you know, kills me to say that another of your monkey-brain plans is working.”

  “You’ll get over it.” It wasn’t easy to joke while my finger was poised over the detonator of a nuclear weapon. Chotek had approved my plan only on the condition that, if the Thuranin even began to suspect there was something other than sugar in our sugar bowl, I would turn all the evidence into subatomic particles. Nukey could thoroughly destroy me and the dropship. Skippy would be fine, although he would lose his collection of cute little outfits. Explosion of the nuke our send our friendly beer can unharmed but spinning off into space, and the Flying Dutchman could recover him later and start over with a different, better idea. Chang would need to wait a month or so to collect Skippy, as the area would most likely be crawling with Thuranin ships investigating the incident. After the Dutchman jumped in, Skippy could ping them to pick him up.

  I was mostly hoping that using Nukey wouldn’t be necessary.

  “Aaaaaaand, done! Doneski, Joe, we are done-a-palooza. Mission accomplished. This part of the mission, anyway. I got all the data we need, and I planted a message for that cruiser to carry to a relay station. As a bonus, it happens to be the closest relay station.”

  “Great. Now we play along?”

  “Yes. Take the dropship two hundred thousand kilometers away, and we will reengage stealth.”

  I got the dropship turned around and fired the engines. What Skippy had done already was the first part of the plan; get close to a Thuranin warship, ransack its database and plant a message. Now we needed to convince that ship’s crew and AI that there was nothing sinister or unusual about our presence. No reason for the ship’s AI to look carefully at its memory storage. No reason for that ship’s AI to suspect someone had been poking around in its highly classified, encrypted files, and no reason to notice it now contained a message that wasn’t there before.

  What I had realized in the Dutchman’s galley, while staring at a sugar bowl that didn’t contain sugar, was that it was Ok if the Thuranin detected our Thuranin dropship. What was not Ok is if they detected the Thuranin dropship had a human inside it. So what we did was encase our dropship in an extra-powerful stealth field, enhanced by the powers of Skippy, and we snuck up close to a Thuranin heavy cruiser. Even with enhanced stealth, the cruiser eventually detected us, and locked weapons on our location. At that point, as planned, Skippy had deactivated our stealth field, to show the Thuranin that the mysterious object sneaking up on their flank was a Thuranin dropship. A Thuranin dropship with all the proper high-level military authentication codes. A modified Thuranin dropship, because we had attached a bunch of useless junk to the outside of the hull. The crew of the cruiser didn’t know our modifications were all fake. Skippy had told them that our dropship contained a highly advanced experimental stealth unit. and the stuff attached to the outside of our dropship was part of the super stealth gear. That advanced technology was how we had been able to get so close to the cruiser before being detected. Skippy told the cruiser that we had been in the area for over a month, and the heavy cruiser was the first ship to detect us. Congratulations to the crew of the cruiser for their vigilance, their exemplary performance would be noted by the Thuranin Office of Special Projects! Of course, the entire incident was top secret, and the crew and AI of the cruiser were to forget everything they had seen.

  The Thuranin bought the whole story. Feeding their cyborg egos had certainly helped. To finish selling our story, we backed off two hundred thousand kilometers, reengaged stealth, and snuck up on the other side of the cruiser until they detected us again. Then we backed away, reactivated stealth, and flew in a wide circle around the cruiser, dropping stealth on the other side of the ship. That time, Skippy lied to them, we got very close and they had not detected us. Skippy thanked the cruiser for assisting the Office of Special Projects to test our advanced stealth capability in a field environment. Then we went back into stealth and I got us the hell out of there. Less than two hours later, the heavy cruiser and its pair of escorts went through the wormhole and we were alone. I sent the retrieval signal to the Flying Dutchman, a signal that would take four hours to reach the ship.

  Looking around the interior of the dropship in dismay, I realized that some housecleaning was in order. “You know what, Skippy, maybe it does smell like fermented monkey butt in here.”

  “Duh, Joe.”

  “Hey, I’ve been washing up as best I can in that tiny sink. I will take another sponge bath, get into a fresh spacesuit, and open the door to vacuum for a couple minutes.”

  The place did smell better after that; certainly I smelled better. And when the Dutchman arrived to pick us up, Skippy was dressed up in a pirate costume, including an eye patch and a tiny parrot on top of his tiny hat.

  He hated it.

  Sergeant Adams assured him that he was adorable.

  He hated that even worse.

  Paradise

  To Major Perkin’s surprise, the formal questioning by the Ruhar lasted only another two days off and on, then weeks went by when nothing happened. The four were allowed open communication with each other; Perkins guessed the Ruhar were hoping they would reveal information by mistake. Since none of them had information the Ruhar cared about, open communication was not a problem. They were not allowed to use zPhones. Dave and Jesse worried that guys in Fort Rakovsky might be screwing with their hooch. He and Jesse had finished it, complete with a couch that now had a nice cover, a coffee table and a dining table with four chairs. No girls yet, but they were patient. Theirs was the nicest hooch in the bustling village of Fort Rakovsky. It had better, Dave swore, be in great co
ndition when they returned. Whenever that was.

  With the questioning apparently over, the four humans were moved to another building outside the air base. This building had two sleeping areas, so they did not have to hang blankets from the ceiling in order to give the women privacy. Three weeks went by, with the four allowed to go outside for exercise and even to walk far afield without a Ruhar escort, as long as they returned before dark. If the humans tried to escape, the Ruhar could surely track them. Perkins suspected the Ruhar had planted tiny tracking devices in their clothing. So, if the humans wanted to escape, they would do it naked, into a wilderness that contained nothing humans could eat. That was not a tempting idea to any of them. There were even deliveries of real human food, to supplement the nutrient mush they were all growing heartily sick of. Through their Ruhar guards, they learned that the Ruhar had also detained Sergeant Koch, plus the three members of Joe’s Embedded Observation Team on Paradise, and several people who had helped Joe shoot down the two Ruhar Whales at Fort Arrow. They were being held in separate places; Major Perkins speculated that the Ruhar had picked up the humans wherever they were, and simply flew them to the nearest Ruhar base.

  When they had been held for five weeks, Major Perkins raised the issue of their continued captivity with one of their guards, a female Ruhar named Mindu who Perkins had been trying to develop a friendship with. Perkins could speak the common Ruhar language, not fluently yet to her chagrin, but passable. “We have been here for over a month,” she used the Ruhar rough time equivalent for ‘month’. “We have not been questioned for many days. Why are we still being held? It must be clear that the four of us have no information about Joe Bishop. I assume you have technology that can tell when a human is not telling the truth.”

  “We have such technology, yes,” Mindu replied slowly in Ruhar, without using a translator. “Instruments which can detect when a subject is lying, or withholding the full truth.”

  “Then you know we do not have any useful information.”