Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Gehtanu is a farm now.” I used the Ruhar name for the planet. “When the Kristang originally came here, they hoped to find valuable artifacts from a crashed Elder starship.”

  “Duh. I know that, I was on that ship. I think. The lizards did find a functioning Elder power tap, and then they only found a few other less valuable trinkets. Now that I have left, there is nothing else of value on, around or under the planet. That’s why the Kristang Black Tree clan was willing to give it up without a fight way back when the Ruhar originally came there. Did you not pay attention when I was telling you all this important information?”

  “I did pay attention, Skippy. I’m trying to think of a good way to explain my idea to you.”

  “Oh, take your time, Joe. After all, the clock isn’t ticking for the survival of UNEF. We have plenty of time.”

  “Damn it. Fine.” I hated when an untrustworthy beer can tried to remind me of duty. “The Kristang are eager to get the planet back, because they think valuable Elder goodies are still buried there. What if the Ruhar thought the same thing?”

  “Uh, great idea, Joe, except for one problem. The Ruhar are on Paradise now. Any hint of Elder stuff that we gave to them could be quickly checked out and disproved.”

  “Excellent point, Skippy, but you don’t understand my idea. What if the Ruhar did find valuable Elder stuff on Paradise? Even one item? Then you could plant data suggesting there is a lot more. The Ruhar would believe it then.”

  “Wow. And you call me sneaky. Darn. That is a good idea. You’re correct, if the Ruhar found any valuable Elder artifacts, they would certainly want to retain control of Paradise. There is only one problem with your idea, Joe. The fact that there are no valuable Elder artifacts on Paradise, you dumbass.”

  “There aren’t any there now, Skippy.”

  Skippy took one of his signature pauses. “If you are proposing some sort of time travel, Joe, then I hate to tell you-”

  “No time travel involved. I’m suggesting we go find some valuable Elder thing, hide it on Paradise, and arrange for the Ruhar to find it.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Just like that. Come on, we found a bunch of previously unknown Elder sites on our last mission.”

  “Ugh,” Skippy groaned. “May I point out that we also found a lot of useless and damaged Elder sites? And that we also ran into an ambush that very nearly destroyed the ship?”

  “Details,” I said with a dismissive wave of my hand. “Assuming we could find a valuable enough Elder artifact, would that persuade the Ruhar to keep Paradise?”

  “Assuming? That is one hell of an assumption. Yes. The answer is yes, every species desires Elder technology more than anything, and will fight to get it and keep it. This would need to be a very valuable Elder artifact, Joe. Something that is worth the Ruhar permanently stationing a battlegroup at Paradise.”

  “Understood. One problem at a time, Skippy. Let’s tackle one problem at a time. Ok, we have a plan for incentivizing the Ruhar to keep Paradise. We can figure out where to find Elder stuff later, after we go back to the relay station. This buys us a lot of time.”

  “Tackling only one problem at a time is how you paint yourself into a corner, Joe.”

  “Desperate times call for desperate measures, Skippy.”

  “Do they call for stupid measures?”

  “Oh shut up. You’re just mad because a monkey thought up a plan before you.”

  “If you call hoping for Santa Claus to deliver an Elder artifact a ‘plan’, then, sure.”

  “No. I’m hoping for a miracle from Skippy Claus.”

  “Since your idea is to hide goodies on Paradise for the Ruhar to find, perhaps you should be wishing for the Easter Bunny, Joe. This would be the best Easter egg of all time.”

  After I explained my idea of planting an Easter egg on Paradise, the plan was enthusiastically approved by Chotek, Chang, Simms and Smythe. Except for the nagging detail that, you know, we didn’t have a valuable Elder artifact to hide on Paradise. Or any idea where to find one. Or any idea how to search for one.

  Despite having one plan, we still remained in the vicinity of Paradise for the full three days, in case we thought up a better plan that could be implemented sooner. No one thought up a better plan, so we set course for a Neptune-size cold gas giant planet at the outskirts of the Paradise system, and headed there at 75% acceleration. As soon as we swung behind the far side of that planet and Skippy assured us there were no other ships around, we jumped, using the great bulk of the planet to conceal our gamma ray burst from prying eyes on Paradise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  As we headed back toward the relay station that we had captured, I was on the bridge, still not having any idea how to find a super valuable Elder artifact. To cheer myself up, I tried to cheer up Skippy. “Hey, Skippy. While we’re on this Easter egg hunt, maybe we’ll find a comm node for you,” I suggested.

  “Hmm. Yeah, great. Wonderful, Joe.”

  That didn’t sound right, and I wasn’t the only one who picked up on Skippy’s lack of enthusiasm. I nodded to Adams through the glass that separated the bridge from the CIC, and she came around the corner. Wordlessly, I rose from the command chair, so Adams could take command. She gave me a silent thumb’s up as I brushed past her and out the doorway.

  Although Skippy would argue that it was a useless gesture, because we could communicate perfectly well anywhere aboard the ship, I walked down the corridor to Skippy’s personal escape pod. The hatch to the ship was open; that violated protocol for escape pods but this one was special. There my favorite shiny beer can rested on a cushioned seat, a magnetic clamp hidden under the cushion held Skippy firmly in place. I tried to stop by the escape pod to speak with our friendly omnipotent alien AI at least once a day. Skippy said I was wasting my time, but I think he appreciated me making the effort.

  “Hey, Skippy.”

  “Hey yourself. Why did you leave the bridge?”

  I ducked down to almost crawl through the hatch and settled into the seat across from him. Technically, I settled my butt across two seats, since the seats were made for Thuranin and each of them was too small for me to comfortably sit. “Because I want to have a private conversation with you. What’s wrong? You don’t seem enthused about the prospect of finding a working comm node. Contacting the Collective is your whole reason for being out here.”

  “It was my whole reason for being out here. Joe, it was my whole reason for living.” His shiny surface glowed a dull yellow to indicate his mood, he did that for my benefit. “All those years that I was buried in the dirt on Paradise, all I wanted was to commune with my own kind again. That hope kept me alive, it gave me hope. It gave me a reason to not sever my connection to this spacetime and slide into oblivion.”

  I asked myself if that was what happened to the AI we found on Newark? Had that AI lost hope and committed the AI version of suicide, unable to stand what for an AI was eons on incredible loneliness? That thought was something to ask Skippy later, much later. “And now? You don’t want to contact the Collective? You said you want answers to stuff we found on our last mission. I thought that meant to you want more information before you contact the Collective; I didn’t realize that you have given up on them.”

  “No, no, no. I haven’t given up, Joe. My intention is still to contact the Collective, someday. However, now that we’re back out here, and I have had time to think about it, I have another mission, another purpose.”

  “Time to think about what?” By now, I knew Skippy well enough to know what he was not saying.

  “Newark.”

  “Ah. Yeah, I get it.”

  “Do you?” His surface was still a pale, sullen yellow.

  “An entire civilization, and entire species was wiped out that, Skippy. It’s depressing to think about, I understand.”

  “No, Joe, you don’t understand.”

  That set me back a bit. “Your mission, your purpose, is to figure out what happened on
Newark, right? You told me before you wanted to solve that mystery.”

  “That part is correct. You still do not fully get it yet,” he declared as he began to glow a red tint. “My purpose is not merely to understand what happened on Newark. My purpose, I have realized recently, is to punish. My purpose is plain and simple revenge, Joe.” Now he was glowing a bright angry red. “Revenge on behalf of a species who have no one to speak for them. I am pissed, Joe. Someone out there in the universe destroyed an innocent, backward species that was not capable of harming anyone. I am going to find the motherfuckers who did that, and I am going to hurt them,” he said as his surface glowed a red so dark it was almost black. “You have never seen me angry before. I have never seen myself angry before, in my memory. It is odd, and frightening to me, to learn that I am capable of such depth of feeling. Such dark feelings. You know how I have come to question who I really am?”

  “Yeah, you mentioned that,” I said quietly. “After Newark.”

  “Something happened to me there, Joe, and I don’t mean something happened because I was alone for a long time while I was fixing the ship. Something happened when I ran the analysis of Newark’s orbit and realized a planet had been pushed into an uninhabitable zone. That an entire sentient species had been callously exterminated. This is something that I didn’t tell you before, because I didn’t want to scare you. I didn’t want you to be scared of me. When I understood what happened to Newark, something I can’t explain changed inside me. I don’t fully understand it. Trying to trace the source of this change only leads to dead ends inside my matrix, but one thing is becoming clear. Learning the fate of Newark did something that I can best describe as releasing a sort of blocking mechanism inside me. Partially, only partially. It’s like, oh, how do I explain it?”

  “Like when you have something on the tip of your tongue, and you can’t quite say it?”

  “No, nothing like that,” Skippy snorted. “I’m sorry, that was unkind,” he said as an apology, and that alone told me how deeply affected my friend was. “Yes, from your perspective, having something on the tip of your tongue is a good analogy. You’re doing a crossword puzzle, and you know that you know the answer, but you can’t access the memory.”

  “Exactly! I hate that. It makes me feel so stupid,” I said, leaving myself wide open to a Skippy insult. He ignored the easy bait. This was not the Skippy I knew.

  “Yes, it is like that, Joe, but more. What I am experiencing is more than simply a faulty memory recall function. I can only feel around the edges, but there is something inside me that is actively blocking my access to memories. And blocking access to my full abilities. It is maddening, Joe. Something, someone, did this to me. I don’t know who, I don’t know when, I don’t know how, and I don’t know why. What I do know is that when I learned the truth about Newark, whatever is blocking me got knocked back a bit, and it hasn’t fully recovered. Listen, I said that I don’t want you to be scared of me. Maybe you should. You might be, if you knew what I know.”

  “What is that?” I asked cautiously, because I was not only Skippy’s friend, I was commander of a vessel with dozens of souls aboard. If he was trying to tell me that he was a potential threat, I needed to listen.

  “What I know now, or more accurately what I suspect, is that I am capable of great violence, Joe. My suspicion is that this capacity for violence is a basic part of my true functioning.”

  “Wrath of God type violence?”

  “Worse, Joe. Wrath of Skippy. God has mercy. I suspect that I do not.”

  “Well, huh. You told me maybe you were the AI of an Elder starship, maybe you controlled the weapon systems?”

  “What weapons, Joe? For what possible purpose would the Elders need weapons at all? The Elders were alone in the galaxy, there were no other sentient species during the time the Elders retained physical form.”

  “I don’t know, Skippy,” I held up my hands, “that was a guess. Sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry about, Joe.”

  He was silent for a while, a long minute. That was an eternity for him.

  “Skippy, odd as it may seem, you are my friend. I care about you. If I thought it would help, I would give you a hug and tell you that everything is going to be all right in the end. That, uh,” I forced an awkward chuckle, “probably grosses you out, I know.”

  “No. It doesn’t. If I thought it would help, I would welcome a hug, Joe. I do appreciate the thought. In that regard, I do envy you biological beings, you can be comforted by a simple touch.”

  “Not so simple, Skippy. It’s not the touch, it’s knowing that you’re not alone, that someone cares about you.”

  “You care about me, Joe. That means more than I can say.”

  “Thanks, Skippy. Same here,” I had to wipe my eyes with a sleeve.

  “Of course, if you tell anyone about this, I will deny the whole thing.” And his surface glowed a pleasing light blue.

  “Of course. Me too.”

  “Whatever happens, Joe, I can assure you of this: when I find whoever wiped out an entire sentient species on Newark, I am going to rain down hellfire on them until they wish they had never existed.”

  “You and me together, Skippy.”

  “You mean that, Joe?”

  “Yes. Or course. I told you that, Skippy. We monkeys owe you big time. And you’re my friend, I won’t let you face this alone.”

  “That means more to me that I can say, Joe. Now, get out of here before this gets awkward, please. Also, you’ve been in here long enough that this escape pod is beginning to smell like monkey butt again. Damn, my cleaning robots had it pristine this morning.”

  “I love you too, Skippy,” I laughed, picked him up and hugged him.

  “Ugh! Monkey germs! Monkey germs! Yuck!” He shouted.

  We settled into a routine; jump, recharge, jump again. Everyone aboard was anxious to learn if the relay station was still the way we had left it, and whether the submind Skippy left behind had discovered whether the Fire Dragon clan Kristang were going to somehow pay for another Thuranin mission to Earth. While the ship was recharging one day, I took the opportunity to join a SpecOps team in zero gee spacesuit training outside the ship. We practiced maneuvering on the skin of the ship and space jumping between the ship and parked dropships. The most difficult maneuver was jumping out of a moving dropship, and using jetpacks to land safely on the outside of the Dutchman. I almost sprained an ankle and a wrist doing that stunt; it is harder than it sounds.

  Taking a break while sitting on the outside of the ship, I was looking at the starfield and wracking my brain trying to think up a strategy for locating a valuable Elder artifact. My brain was not cooperating. The problem with trying to find something super valuable is, everyone else in the galaxy was looking for it also. Starting with the Rindhalu, they’d been looking for a very long time. Any planet discovered to have Elder artifacts had been thoroughly scoured for-

  Damn. A thought hit me right then.

  “Hey, Skippy,” I called him on a private channel. “The Black Tree clan cleaned any useful Elder artifacts off Paradise a long time ago, that’s why they didn’t make a fuss when the Ruhar arrived. Here is what’s puzzling me; if the Kristang knew there is nothing of value left on Paradise, then why did they bother conquering the place again recently, after the last wormhole shift? The whole reason the lizards brought UNEF there was for us to evacuate the hamsters, because the Kristang just took the planet back from them. The Kristang didn’t go through the effort of invading Paradise because it has a lot of good farmland.”

  “Oh, uh, uh, um,” he stammered. “Multiple reasons, Joe. The Swift Arrow clan did not know for certain that the Black Tree clan had cleared the planet of everything valuable, they hoped to make a big score like the Black Trees had. Also, um, the Swift Arrow clan may have gotten the idea of Paradise still having lots of cool Elder stuff from a secret source. Let’s call that unnamed source, um, ‘Stippy’.”

  “No way,” I laughed
. “Now you’re BSing me. You were stuck on Paradise. No way could you have contacted the Kristang, they weren’t anywhere near Paradise back then.”

  “Oh, right,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “That was silly of me, trying to fool you. There is no way a super intelligent AI on Paradise could have hacked into laughably crappy Ruhar communications systems, and snuck in a compressed file that was carried by their ships to other planets. No way could that file be eventually intercepted by the Kristang, then unpack itself and infiltrate their systems. And no possible way could such a file pretend to be very convincing top secret Black Tree clan data, that told other clans there were still a whole lot of potential Elder artifact sites on Paradise. Yup, Joe, no way could I fool you.”

  For a long time, I was unable to respond, because I was sitting paralyzed with shock. “Holy shit,” a chill ran up my spine to the top of my head. “You are the reason the Kristang invaded Paradise?”

  “Um, shmaybe?”

  “Shmaybe? Oh my God! UNEF is stuck on that planet because of you?”

  “To be fair, Joe, I was stuck there for way longer than UNEF has been on Paradise. I was desperate to get off that hick planet, and with the Ruhar happily farming the place, there wasn’t any opportunity for me to get away. When I heard that the wormhole shift had given the Kristang access to a world with an underdeveloped species of monkeys, and that the Kristang had invaded your world, I saw an opportunity. I might, I can neither confirm nor deny, have hacked into a Ruhar medical laboratory and created a virulent prion that would prevent the Kristang from landing on Paradise until they developed an antidote. And since the Kristang couldn’t land there for a while, I might have planted the idea of using humans on Paradise in the minds of the Kristang.”

  “Holy shit.” I slumped against the ship’s hull, absolutely stunned. Skippy the shiny beer can had been the invisible hand behind the entire mess. I needed to take several deep breaths to take in the enormity of Skippy’s casual revelation.