Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  Or, we later learned, three of them were sleeping in their bunks. The three awake were either too excited about having an Elder power tap to sleep, or they wanted to run tests on it while the other three were sleeping. We never did get a clear picture of the social dynamics among the six occupants of the facility, because one of the three what were awake noticed a light indicating that an airlock was cycling. It was cycling because we were coming in, the computer had let us in. That unnamed, alert Thuranin probably thought at first that one of the supposedly sleeping Thuranin was awake and had decided to go outside. Or already was outside, and was coming back in. Either way, the secret, unauthorized midnight experiment on the precious Elder power tap was in danger of being discovered. So this alert Thuranin sounded an alarm for its two fellows, and used the simple expedient of switching on an exterior camera to see who was coming in through the airlock.

  We were not able to do any magical Skippy tricks of showing a false image through the camera, all we had done was smear some sticky goop and mud over the camera lens. That likely bought us five or ten seconds while the curious Thuranin wondered what had gone wrong with the camera. Then it did the smart thing of checking which of the three supposedly sleeping Thuranin was not in their bunk.

  Except all three of them were sleeping in their bunks. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

  The first thing we noticed was the airlock quit cycling. The light that was yellow turned red, and we heard a loud clanging sound as an interior blast door slammed shut. Immediately after that, we were illuminated from above. The Thuranin had launched a recon drone that popped up above the facility and spotlighted us before Giraud shot it down. There was no way the Thuranin could mistake our Kristang powered armor suits, because we had left the camo netting behind when we crossed the perimeter. They probably were confused by the three Thuranin combots we had with us. Whatever confusion that caused didn’t last long, because someone inside activated the automatic defenses, and doors in the exterior walls slid aside for computer-controlled guns to lock in on us.

  That was a nice try, anyway. We knew about the autoguns, and had placed charges over the doors. As soon as those access doors slid aside, our shaped charges blew the gun emplacements before the muzzles could clear the exterior walls.

  “Oh, bollocks,” Smythe said calmly. “The queen has rescinded her formal invitation to tea, we will have to do this the hard way. Rocket Team One, clear us a path.”

  Rocket Team One was four troops of mixed nationality, lead by Captain Renee Giraud, who had rockets that were normally part of a combot’s weaponry. Since we only had three combots with us, we had two teams carrying rockets with them. Just one rocket ripped a hole in the exterior wall, and four soldiers used their powered armor to tear the hole open wide enough for a combot to stride through. Two of the hulking machines led the way, with one held in reserve. Whenever we encountered a blast door or a well-defended section of the facility, the combots pulled aside and a rocket took out the obstacle.

  The biggest obstacle we faced was a half-dozen combots that were controlled by the facility’s computer. The first three caused us a surprising amount of trouble. They managed to destroy one of our combots and partly disable another, before Skippy had gathered enough data to analyze their tactics. After that, we pulled our reserve combot forward and sent the damaged one back to guard our rear. With Skippy telling us how to confuse and defeat the Thuranin computer’s defense tactics, we made rapid progress. Two of the Thuranin opposed us directly with weapons, one of them got off a fusillade of shots that knocked down a Chinese soldier; he quickly jumped in his dented armor up to show us that he was all right. Those two Thuranin were the last obstacle to us getting the Elder power tap, it was inside some kind of test chamber. Skippy told us to be careful not to damage it, so instead of blowing the heavy door off the test chamber, we tried overriding the locking mechanism. That was no good, one of the Thuranin had fried the controls when they heard us coming. Although they wrongly assumed we were Kristang, they correctly assumed we were coming after the power tap, and they did what they could to deny us the prize.

  We were exposed while we used a plasma torch to cut into the door. Although four people with torches were able to slice the door open in less than a minute, it felt like forever as we were still taking fire the whole time. Finally, an Indian paratrooper squeezed in and got our prize, slinging it on his back in an armored pack. He was halfway back out through the door when were attacked by a pair of combots. Two explosive-tipped rounds ricocheted off the heavy door, knocking the paratrooper back into the chamber. Smythe shouted for him to stay down, as his people sent a furious hail of bullets and rockets at the combots, and our own combot launched itself through the air. One of the enemy combots disappeared in an explosion as it was shredded by rockets and explosive-tipped rounds. The other was tackled by our out-of-ammo combot. The two machines rolled and crashed around the high-ceilinged laboratory, wrecking equipment and breaking the leg of one British SAS, who was unable to get out of the way in time. The two damned things nearly took my head off, one moment they were entangled on the other side of the laboratory, in a blink of an eye they were headed straight for me. I dropped to the floor, the heavy gravity of Jumbo saved me as I crashed to the ground quicker than normal. By the time I rolled onto my back, it was over. Both combots had torn each other apart.

  “Go!” Smythe shouted. “Move, get out of there!”

  With the Indian paratrooper surrounded by a half dozen high-speed special forces for protection, we began our egress operation, going back out the same way we came in. “Uh oh, Joe, you’d best move faster,” Skippy shouted in my helmet speakers.

  “Why?” As if we needed any incentive to move faster?

  “That Thuranin computer has concluded that it has lost the battle, and that a hostile force has captured critical technology. Following ARD protocols, it is preparing to self-destruct the facility to prevent you from getting away.”

  “Shit! How long do we have?”

  “Eighteen seconds according to the Thuranin computer’s internal clock. I am doing what I can to mess with its sense of time, however, I would advise you to run like hell. You have less than three minutes to get clear of a two kiloton explosion.”

  “Major Smythe!” I shouted.

  “I heard, Colonel. All troops, discard weapons and packs, except for the power tap. Proceed at maximum speed to get clear of the perimeter,” he said calmly. Then, to assure everyone how serious he was, he shouted. “Move! Run! RUN!”

  We ran. Once we got clear of the exterior wall, which took only forty seconds, we used the full power of our suits and ran like hell across the rolling dirt of Jumbo. The suit computers, enhanced by Skippy, did more than half the work of keeping us upright. There was a menu projected on the interior of our visors that we could select with an eye blink, a particular click engaged the suit’s ‘Escape’ function. With that feature engaged, the suit mostly ran by itself, using its sensors to keep the slow and clumsy wearers upright during our headlong emergency run across the star-blasted landscape. Those people who had been slow to click their suit’s Escape function found that Skippy had done it for them. The entire team was racing across the ground at about eighty miles an hour; so fast that my bouncing and jolted vision could not keep up. No way could I have run that fast with me controlling the suit; I would have stumbled and crashed. After what seemed like an eternity of frantic running, with my brain surely sustaining a concussion from rattling around in my skull, Skippy shouted a warning for us to drop flat. My suit fell in a controlled manner, to leave me skidding across dirt and rocks until I came to rest, face down. “Skippy, when-”

  He didn’t need to answer, as my visor automatically darkened and the ground beneath me heaved. It heaved so strongly that I went flying ten feet in the air, and came down rolling around and around uncontrollably as the blast wave hit us. My suit computer said we had gotten only three kilometers from the facility when it blew up.

  Wh
en the blast wave passed on, I stumbled shakily to my knees. “Are we all right, Skippy?”

  “Oh, sure, Joe. That was a compression warhead, there’s little radiation to worry about. You’re safe in your suits.”

  “Great, thanks.” Checking my helmet visor, I saw that the entire assault team had survived the explosion. “What’s the status of the power tap?”

  “It is good, Colonel,” came the reply. “My pack has holes in it, but the case with the power tap is intact.”

  “Outstanding, good work.” I got to my feet and brushed my knees off without remembering that I was in an armored suit. To my left, a soldier was jumping up and down, verifying her suit was still in perfect working order. “Poole, did you think that was awesome also?”

  “Absolutely, Sir,” she replied, and I could imagine her ear to ear grin behind her darkened visor. “I’d like to do that again. Without the explosion.”

  “Roger that, I’ll see what I can do about that. Major Smythe, let’s walk,” I looked at which way the wind was blowing the debris. There was a mushroom cloud looming over us, all that was left of the Thuranin facility. “North,” I said, pointing in the direction the wind was coming from. “Skippy, can you send a dropship down to pick us up?”

  “Colonel Chang will be jumping the ship into orbit in less than two minutes, Joe,” Skippy said cheerily. “Dropship is prepped and ready for launch.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

  “Oh damn it!” Skippy shouted. “Unbelievable! How the HELL did those idiots manage to do that? I, I, I-” he sputtered. “Unfreakin’ believable!”

  “What?” I asked, alarmed. “What’s wrong?” We had flown back up to the Dutchman with the Elder power tap, and as soon as the dropship was secured, the ship jumped away. I brought the power tap into Skippy’s man cave; he said he didn’t need to be that close, but the process of making it functional again would take almost half an hour. Less than ten minutes after we brought the power tap aboard, Skippy began shouting.

  “They broke it, Joe! Somehow, in spite of the Elders’ efforts to idiot-proof their devices, these idiots managed to break it!”

  “What do you mean broke, Skippy?” I looked out the hatchway of the escape pod, where Chotek, Chang, Simms, Smythe, Adms, Giraud, Friedlander and others were crowded into the hallway, craning their necks to see what was going on. “We know that it doesn’t work, that’s why we were able to get it. A functional power tap could never have been picked up by an ARD ship based on a simple message. Go ahead and fix it.”

  “I can’t, you moron,” Skippy said angrily. “Don’t you think I would do it if I could? The only thing wrong with this power tap was that it needed to be rebooted. But somehow, the stupid, stupid Thuranin managed to truly break it! They screwed with it and broke it for real.”

  “Ok,” I said quietly. “But you can still fix it, right? You can get it working again?”

  “No, Joe,” he said disgustedly. “If I could do that, I wouldn’t be so upset. It would be easier for me to build a new power tap than to get this one working again.”

  “Oh. Can you do that?”

  “Of course not, you dumdum. To create Elder technology like that, I would need access to Elder technology that no longer exists in this galaxy. As far as I know it doesn’t. Unlike human technology, the Elders didn’t make everything out of mud and sticks. We’re screwed. No way can I fix this piece of junk. Damn it!”

  “This was all for nothing, then?” Chotek asked, astonished.

  “Yes!” Skippy said.

  “No,” I protested, not willing to believe we had failed, after all we had gone through.

  Chotek looked at me. “If this thing doesn’t work, Colonel, how was this trip not for nothing?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I answered lamely.

  “Surely they can’t all be broken,” Chang asked.

  “No,” Skippy said grumpily, “I think whatever experiments the Thuranin have been running somehow damaged this one. Any power tap they ran that experiment on would be broken; the power tap’s connection to, hmmm, I had better not tell you monkeys about that. The problem is, without access to ARD records, there is no way to know how many of these things they screwed with and broke. I have to say,” he mused, “it is actually impressive that a low-tech species like the Thuranin managed to affect a power tap in any way. It had to be dumb luck. No way are those little green men capable of understanding the principles of how this technology works.”

  “We can get another one?” Simms suggested.

  Chotek shook his head. “We don’t have time. And I think the Advanced Research Directorate would become suspicious if we try that delivery trick again.”

  “As much as I hate to say it,” Skippy grumbled, “Count Chocula is right. After that ship dropped off the power tap here, it was scheduled to visit seven other ARD installations, and then it was stopping at an ARD administrative depot for resupply. That will happen in about two months. As soon as that ship reports that it delivered a power tap here, there are going to be a whole lot of uncomfortable questions being asked by ARD headquarters, and they’re going to be sending ships to Jumbo. They are also going to be tightening their procedures. We won’t be able to simply order an ARD ship to do our shipping for us.”

  “Will that cause a problem for us?” Chotek was alarmed. “If the Thuranin are somehow able to trace the delivery message back to us-”

  “That will not be a problem,” Friedlander spoke up. “Skippy and I discussed this before he sent the message. I suggested that he include hints that the order to deliver a power tap to Jumbo originated with one of the researchers on Jumbo; that one of them manipulated the situation because he or she wanted access to a power tap.”

  I blinked slowly. “Is that true, Skippy?”

  “Yup. Just what the rocket scientist said.”

  Chotek was as surprised as I was. “When were you going to tell us about this?” He demanded.

  “There wasn’t any reason to,” Friedlander said simply, seeming surprised at the question.

  “Yeah, Chocula,” Skippy scoffed. “A lot of stuff happens around here that you and Colonel Joe don’t know about.”

  “The six Thuranin on Jumbo,” Chotek wasn’t letting this go, “they are all dead?”

  “Most assuredly,” Skippy replied. “In addition to the ones killed in the assault, the others died when the facility self-destructed. The computer locked the blast doors so they couldn’t escape. The ARD considers the information in their heads to be classified; they would never be allowed to fall into enemy hands.”

  “They were dead anyway,” I looked at Chotek. Before the assault, he had expressed serious concerns that we were planning to deliberately kill civilians. At the time, I didn’t have a good answer for him, other than that they were in the way, and we needed the power tap to save thousands of humans on Paradise.

  Chotek looked at the deck for a moment, then at me. “Colonel Bishop, we do not have time to attempt seizure of another power tap. Please set course back to the relay station.” Seeing that I was going to protest, he added “I am sure that you and your people are tired. My suggestion is that you rest, and approach the problem with fresh minds tomorrow.” What he didn’t say was, the issue was closed. It was over. UNEF was stuck on Paradise, and we had no way to prevent the Ruhar from selling the planet out from under them.

  “Joe, I have a question,” Skippy said while I was in my office, which was a refreshing change from him bugging me in the shower, while brushing my teeth, or any other inconvenient moment. Supposedly, I was in my office to review reports on my tablet; in reality I’d grown bored with that in about three minutes and was now playing solitaire. And losing every game. I told myself that Skippy had hacked into the solitaire program just to screw with me, I wasn’t giving him the satisfaction of knowing it bothered me. Sometimes, if you were patient enough to ignore Skippy long enough, he went away. “I’m asking now,” he explained, “because I can see you are super busy.”

 
; “Hey, these cards aren’t going to arrange themselves.” Truthfully, I had been wracking my brain to think of an alternative way to prevent the Ruhar from trading away Paradise, and I had absolutely no useful ideas. Playing solitaire was a way to distract me from my failure.

  “You’re bored? Hmm, there is no internet access here in interstellar space, but before we left Earth I downloaded petabytes of porn. What’s your interest? Let me guess. Clowns? Midgets?”

  “No porn, Skippy.”

  “Ah. Lesbian midget clowns?”

  “I don’t want any more porn!” I shouted, just as Sergeant Adams walked in my open office door. She must have heard me, because her mouth was open in surprise. “Oh, crap.” I softly pounded my forehead on the table. “Please, just kill me now.”

  “Sir?” She said warily. “Is this a bad time?”

  Skippy spoke before I could. “Joe is bored with his usual porn selections. Hey, Sarge Marge, can you guess what Joe likes-”

  “Sergeant,” I mumbled with my face planted on the desk. “I hope you are here to report that our reactors are about to explode.”

  “Sir, I’ll come back later when you’re not so busy,” Adams couldn’t keep the mirth out of her voice.