Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Chotek frowned. “I do not understand why we could not simply inform the Ruhar about the projectors, and let them deal with the Kristang. Surely, between the projectors and their remaining ships, the Ruhar here would regain the upper hand.”

  “Whoa! That is a terrible, terribly awful idea there, Chocula,” Skippy said scoffingly. “The Ruhar’s communications have been partially compromised by the Kristang. We can’t tell the hamsters, because that poses too much risk of the Swift Arrow Kristang learning the secret.”

  “I also think, sir, that we can’t trust the Ruhar to deliver the outcome we desire,” I used big buzzwords that Chotek was used to. “The Ruhar might merely reactivate the projectors and use them to threaten the Kristang, to strengthen their hand in negotiations to hand the planet to the Kristang. What we need, sir, is a shooting war between the Ruhar and the Kristang here. If a small UNEF group could reactivate projectors, and we use them to destroy most of the Swift Arrow’s battlegroup, that will force the Ruhar to take military action. It would change the balance of power, sir.”

  “Then we might be right back to the situation before the Swift Arrow task force arrived, Colonel,” Chotek responded. “With the Ruhar in a strong position to negotiate, but still in the process of negotiating the planet away beneath UNEF.”

  “That is possible, sir,” I explained patiently. “The way I look at it, with the Swift Arrow battlegroup in control of the skies, we have no options. Without that battlegroup, we may be able to affect the outcome.”

  “Affect it how?” Chotek asked. “We still have the constraint of avoiding exposure.”

  “Avoiding exposure is paramount,” I agreed. “Right now, I don’t know how we may be able to assist UNEF. But five minutes ago, we didn’t know there was a way for us to destroy a Kristang battlegroup,” I pointed out. “One thing I have learned out here is, almost anything is possible. We will have plenty of time to develop ideas before the situation on Paradise restabilizes, hopefully with the Ruhar firmly back in control.”

  Our friendly local UN bureaucrat pursed his lips in thought. “Before any action is taken, Colonel, I will need to see a detailed plan. We will have to assess the risks. To be clear,” he stopped me before I could respond. “We have to weigh the risk of exposure,” he ticked the risks off on his fingers. “The risk to our primary objective. And, Colonel, the risk that our operation may fail, and the blowback to our people on Paradise makes the situation worse for them.”

  “Understood,” I said, and I actually fully agreed with him. If either the Ruhar or Kristang learned that human troops were secretly traveling around Paradise reactivating maser cannons, the impact to UNEF could be severe. And once those cannons fired, I don’t see how the Ruhar could fail to figure out that humans had forced them into a shooting war. After that, the humans there may be in as much danger from the Ruhar as from the Kristang. “Skippy, please provide a briefing packet about the projectors; capabilities, operational characteristics, the procedure for reactivating them, etc. Distribute the data to the entire crew including the science team; we need everyone involved in the planning. Unit leaders,” I addressed the SpecOps team commanders but especially Major Smythe, “read the briefing packet and put your thinking caps on. We have nine days until we will be within jump range of the Paradise system, and we still need to stay here for a while. We can’t leave this relay station until Skippy is satisfied his submind is properly installed and operating properly. And we need to complete repairs to the exterior of the station, to maintain our ruse. Everyone, thank you, and- Wait. Skippy, what else have you not told us?”

  “Ugh. Since I don’t know what it is that you don’t know; the scope of your ignorance, I can’t guess what I haven’t told you. There is nothing anywhere near as important as secret maser cannons, I’m sure of that.”

  “Good.” Skippy’s words had not reassured me. “If you think of anything else, call me immediately?”

  “I’d prefer to wait until you’re in the bathroom like usual, but for this I can break with tradition, Joe.”

  Paradise

  Flight Leader Second Class Saily Chernandagren climbed into her two seater Dobreh fighter, the type of aircraft that humans had derisively named ‘Chicken’. On the home planet of the Ruhar, a Dobreh was a fierce bird of prey; and animal to be feared in the air. Saily had not understood why the humans had renamed the aircraft after a tame, domesticated bird, other than the fact that humans were strange and no Ruhar could truly understand such primitive creatures. As Saily attached her oxygen mask, she pressed a button and the soft surface of the mask flowed around her nose and mouth, forming a secure seal even over the soft Ruhar fur that covered her face. Human male pilots, she knew, had to scrape the fur off their faces every morning in order to get a good seal on an oxygen mask. Ruhar males grew hair on their faces also, but it was a soft, downy fur rather than the bushy tangle that humans could grow.

  Humans were strange creatures, Saily thought as she draped her arms over each side of the cockpit to show the ground crew that she was not yet touching any of the controls. Strange, and in many ways, to be pitied. They had barely achieved a rudimentary form of spaceflight when they were forced into the war by the wormhole shift. Then they were brought out to the stars as expendable ground troops by their ‘allies’ the Kristang. Saily had been born and raised on Gehtanu, the world called ‘Paradise’ by the humans. Along with all Ruhar, she had resented human soldiers landing on her planet and forcing her people off the world that was their home. She had hated the humans, even after Saily’s commanding officer noted that having humans handle the evacuation was far better than the task being managed by the cruel and untrustworthy Kristang. Some of the humans could say nasty things, but most of them had been professional, simply eager to do their jobs and go home as quickly as possible. The human leadership had been scrupulous about adhering to the code of conduct established between the Ruhar and Kristang for the evacuation. There had been remarkably few incidents of violence directed at Ruhar civilians by humans. Remarkable indeed, because humans believed the Ruhar had attacked their home world in order to enslave and destroy humanity. If the situation had been reversed, Saily did not know whether she would have been able to restrain herself.

  Since the humans had first landed, Saily had many opportunities to meet humans and even to spend extensive time with them. Human pilots had arrived on Gehtanu with an average of one hundred twenty hours of flight training in Ruhar aircraft; having been given a rush course at some interim staging base. For pilots who would fly the high-performance Dobreh gunships, most of them had less than twenty hours in that type. Humans had arrived in a potential combat zone with woefully inadequate flying experience, and they knew it. The human commander had quickly reached an agreement with the Ruhar leadership on Gehtanu for Ruhar pilots to continue the training of human pilots. That agreement had been mutually beneficial; the humans gained valuable experience from experts, and the Ruhar pilots kept their own skills from growing rusty. Keeping their flying skills fresh had proved useful when the Ruhar fleet came back to take control of the planet again. Now that a Kristang battlegroup was in orbit and the Kristang had landed combat aircraft and ground troops, Saily was especially grateful that her connection with the high-performance Dobreh was still instinctive.

  One of the human pilots she had trained was still at the airbase, now on her ground crew. He was Lieutenant Derek Bonsu of the American Army. Lieutenant was roughly equivalent to the Ruhar rank of Flier First Class; two steps below Saily’s own rank. The fact that Derek, as she called him, was an A-mer-i-can seemed to be important to him but meaningless to Saily or any other Ruhar. The Ruhar species had a half dozen major cultural groups with slightly different languages, but their military was one cohesive unit. The idea that soldiers who fought side by side could owe allegiance to different governments was odd to the Ruhar. Indeed, it seemed similar to the clan culture of the Kristang. With the Kristang expending more time, effort and passion fighting among themselve
s than fighting their mutual enemies, the Ruhar had been able to defeat them in almost every major engagement of their endless war, even though the Kristang economy and culture was almost entirely dedicated to supporting the war.

  Another thing the Kristang found odd about humans was the different colors of their skin. In this regard, humans were also more similar to the Kristang, whose scales had many hues. Derek Bonsu’s own skin was dark; he had once explained with pride that his ancestors came from a place called ‘Africa’, which again meant nothing to Saily. All Ruhar had the same pinkish-beige skin tone; it was their fur color that varied. Saily’s own fur was white with patches of light brown, and fur color was neither a fashion choice nor a cultural marker for the Ruhar. She kept the fur on her head long; for flying or athletic activities she tied her fur back in what humans called a short ‘ponytail’.

  The ground crew leader signaled that Saily could close her canopy and turn on the master power switch, which she did. Her Weapon Systems Officer in the back seat announced that all of the ship’s systems were ready for engine start, and she confirmed from her own instruments. Before signaling the crew chief that she was ready for engine start, she turned in her seat to look back along both sides of the aircraft.

  On the left side was Lt. Derek Bonsu with the external power cart. Saily liked Derek, although he had come to Gehtanu as the enemy. Derek had an infectious grin and never complained, even when eating bland nutrient mush two times a day. On the rare occasions when he received a ‘care package’ of real human food from Lemuria, he treated every tomato or loaf of bread as if it were the most precious gift in the universe. Even when the Kristang battlegroup jumped in and took back control of the planet, Bonsu had not lost his good natured grin for a moment. The planet had changed management several times already, Bonus had said about the current Kristang mastery of the skies. Next week, the Ruhar fleet might get bored elsewhere in the sector and come to Gehtanu to chase the Kristang away. Bonus said no one knew what the future held, so why waste energy worrying about what you couldn’t control?

  Along with the sunny disposition that made him popular even among Ruhar who did not like humans, Bonsu had other qualities. He had made a serious effort right from the start to learn the Ruhar common language. It helped his popularity that the first words he learned were common swear words, and soon he was cursing fluently in Ruhar. Saily noticed that now, whenever a wrench slipped and Bonsu bashed his knuckles, he cursed in Ruhar without thinking about it.

  But the ultimate reason Derek Bonsu was working at a Ruhar airbase, instead of farming in Lemuria with his fellow humans, was that he loved flying. When the Ruhar fleet had jumped in and firmly established control of the planet, their United Nations Expeditionary Force Headquarters had quickly ordered all units to surrender; the alternative being for human forces to be pounded from orbit by masers and railguns. Most human pilots had flown to the nearest airbase and abandoned their ships immediately. Some pilots had set their aircraft down in remote areas, near clusters of human ground troops. Some ‘Chicken’ crews had even spitefully ejected from their ships, causing complete loss of the aircraft.

  Lt. Derek Bonsu had calmly flown his Dobreh back to its home base, bringing it down in front of his designated hangar. Bonsu had followed the guidebook’s recommended procedure for engine shutdown; allowing the engines to run at idle for three minutes to cool before cutting power. He and his Weapon Systems Officer has then refueled and secured the aircraft, placing covers over the intakes and hanging red tags from items that needed to be checked during preflight inspection. He had properly listed minor issues in the aircraft’s official squawk log; noting that the nose landing gear door was slow to open and that the right engine surged for a few seconds when throttling above 80% power. Lastly, Bonsu had vacuumed out the cockpit and wiped down the display screens. That particular Dobreh became Saily’s assigned aircraft, and she appreciated the care Bonsu had taken with her aircraft. Such good care that ‘her’ Dobreh was the first to return to flight status when the Ruhar had reoccupied the airbase.

  All those characteristics were reasons why Lt. Derek Bonsu had been one of only four humans invited to remain at the airbase as liaisons with the Ruhar. None of the four humans were allowed to fly regularly, except for brief proficiency check flights every two months. Otherwise, the humans worked alongside Ruhar aircraft maintenance crews. And the humans took every minute of flight simulator time they could get, even waking up in the early hours of the morning to avoid taking precious simulator time away from Ruhar pilots. At first, the maintenance crews had assigned the four humans only humiliating tasks such as keeping the hangar floors clean and other menial work. Even now that the humans had earned the respect of the base personnel, a Ruhar was required to inspect and sign off every time a human touched an aircraft.

  Bonsu removed the external power cable, closed the access door, checked that it was secure, and held up an index finger which was the Ruhar equivalent of a human thumbs up sign. Saily acknowledged him with a thumbs up, then Bonsu retreated with the power cable, retracting it into the cart. When the cart was safely out of the way, the Ruhar crew chief made a gesture of twirling an index finger in the air; the signal to start the engines.

  Derek Bonsu stood in his designated position behind the power cart, helmet on and hearing protection engaged, as he watched Saily run up the Dobreh’s power, then take off smoothly. Derek had one hand on a fire extinguisher clipped to the side of the power cart, ready in case anything went wrong. Nothing would go wrong; all the pilots were skilled and diligent and the aircraft were well maintained. The only potential problem Derek could foresee was that their supply of spare parts and consumable items was running low. The whole maintenance crew was concerned about the parts issue, and other airbases on Gehtanu reported having the same problem. Under the terms of the cease fire agreement, the Kristang battlegroup allowed the Ruhar to bring in supply ships, but the Ruhar government had been strangely stingy about shipping in anything other than medical supplies. Even before the Kristang battlegroup occupied the sky, Derek had heard rumors that the Ruhar federal government was considering negotiating away Gehtanu in exchange for more valuable territory. Some Ruhar at the airbase said those negotiations were the reason why they weren’t getting critical spare parts; the government didn’t plan on Ruhar being on Gehtanu long-term.

  Derek didn’t know what to think about such rumors, and he didn’t think rumors mattered much anyway. As he watched Saily’s aircraft join up with three others and race toward the eastern horizon, there was a brief flicker of light above them. It was sunlight glinting off a Kristang warship in orbit. While the Kristang battlegroup was in orbit, the willingness of the Ruhar federal government to negotiate did not matter. One way or the other, the Kristang were going to take back control of the planet, and Derek Bonsu was going to be in as much trouble as all the other humans. More trouble, perhaps, because he had actively helped the Ruhar military.

  Derek would worry about that later, when he had to. What he most cared about now was that his next proficiency check flight in a Dobreh was not for another six weeks, and he did not know how he could stand to wait that long to get back into the sky. Seeing Saily soaring away in the Dobreh that he used to fly caused a physical pang of pain in his stomach.

  He looked again at the sky, seeking another flicker of light from a ship in the Kristang battlegroup. If the lizards retained control of Paradise, Derek knew he would never fly again. If he lived at all.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Flying Dutchman

  We jumped the Flying Dutchman into the far outskirts of the Paradise system, an area sparely populated by chunks of dead-cold dirty balls of ice and rock. From that distance, the star that shone on Paradise was a dim, fuzzy dot; a star rather than a sun. Skippy reported we had emerged in a region with an ordinary density of hydrogen atoms, it was nothing to write home about.

  From our position, Paradise was five hours away, so the sensor data we had to work with was that
old. In four hours, we would jump again, as the gamma ray burst of our jump in would be visible from Paradise and we didn’t want anyone coming out to investigate. We performed six jumps, with the last coming in barely above the cloud tops on the far side of the system’s only gas giant. By then, Skippy had determined that the only ships in the area were the Kristang in orbit around Paradise, and a handful of Ruhar ships were several lightminutes away from the planet.

  By listening to message traffic both on the planet and between ships, Skippy was able to determine the situation had not changed significantly from what he had learned at the data relay station. The Kristang had over twenty warships, plus support ships, in orbit and complete supremacy in the space around Paradise. The remnants of the Ruhar defense task force were licking their wounds. A truce had been offered by the Kristang commander and accepted by the Ruhar, there had not been any violations of the cease-fire, which surprised me. The Kristang had landed thousands of troops and heavy equipment including aircraft, in a relatively uninhabited area of the northern continent. Humans isolated on Lemuria so far had been ignored by both sides, although Skippy had intercepted messages from the Kristang warning UNEF to cease any and all cooperation with the Ruhar. And the Ruhar had removed or disabled farming equipment they had provided to UNEF. Without any assistance from the Ruhar, humans were reduced to plowing fields behind hamvees, and by dragging plows behind teams of soldiers. UNEF appeared to be on the verge of a split between those who favored loyalty to the Kristang and those who wished to be neutral or align with the Ruhar. Discipline was breaking down as UNEF became scattered groups of farm villages rather than a military force. Negotiations were still ongoing between the Ruhar and the Kristang, although the Kristang now had the upper hand and were pushing the Ruhar to finish the details quickly. According to message traffic between the Ruhar commodore and the planetary government, the Ruhar Navy had contingency plans to send a major battlegroup to Paradise, but the commodore advised that was highly unlikely. The Jeraptha were concentrating on consolidating spectacular gains from their recent, highly successful offensive, and did not want to divert a substantial force for a planet their client species wanted to get rid of.