Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “No problem,” Skippy said cheerily, “Sergeant Adams and I can continue this privately. So far, I’ve covered clowns and-”

  “Goodbye, Sergeant,” I mumbled with a dismissive wave of a hand. Waiting a couple seconds, I looked up to see she had wisely departed. “You had a question, Skippy? It had better not be about porn.”

  “No, Joe. This question is about slang I heard during the party when you went back to your hometown. I know that ‘mow down’ is to eat a lot of food, and ‘wicked’ is the same as ‘very’-”

  “What? That’s not what wicked means.”

  “Joe, when something is very much a ‘pissah’, it is a ‘wicked pissah’, correct?”

  “Oh, uh, I guess, sort of. Look, Skippy, there is a wicked lot you’re missing. You have to grow up with it to understand. What is your question?”

  “I want the definition of ‘douchebag’. It’s not the same as a jerk, is it? I ask because people at the party were saying that some guy is a d-bag, and they described him as more arrogant than boorish.”

  “Oh, man,” I ran a hand over my head. “First, that is originally a New England expression, it got totally corrupted when it started getting used in freakin’ Hollywood movies. A d-bag is a guy-”

  “Always a guy?”

  “Always a guy, never a woman. This is a guy who is a jerk because he is so arrogant and totally into himself.”

  “So, a d-bag is a jerk because he’s clueless about social norms?”

  “No, a d-bag isn’t clueless about being a jerk, a d-bag does it deliberately. He knows he’s being a douchebag, and he goes right ahead. Like, any guy who wears the collar of his polo shirt up, or ties a sweater around his shoulders, is borderline engaging in d-bag behavior. This is something better explained with an example. Let’s say there’s a guy who drives his Porsche to a restaurant-”

  “Do all douchebags drive Porsches?”

  “No, but that is a popular car for the aspiring douchebag.”

  “Men aspire to be a douchebag?” Skippy asked incredulously.

  “Sure. Guys don’t think of it that way, but that’s what they’re doing. So, this guy drives his Porsche to a restaurant. And he leaves the headlights on. That way, the waiter or someone will announce there is a Porsche outside with headlights on. Then the douchebag will loudly announce ‘Oh, I have left on the lights of MY PORSCHE. I have to go out to MY PORSCHE and take care of that’.”

  “Ah. I see. He is not only a jerk, he is a jerk in a socially awkward, pathetic, desperate attempt for attention; thus opening himself for understandable scorn and ridicule from society.”

  “You got it,” I agreed, think that Skippy himself may be an expert on social awkwardness.

  “Bonus points if this guy has his collar up and ties a sweater over his shoulders?”

  “Oh, yeah. A guy like that would be a HOFer.”

  “A HOFer?” Skippy asked, confused.

  “He would be a shoo-in for the douchebag Hall Of Fame.”

  “There is a hall of fame for douchebags?” Skippy gasped.

  “No, Skippy. I meant, if there were such a hall of fame, that guy would have his picture right inside the front door.”

  “Wow, this is complicated.”

  “Human culture is complicated, Skippy, but you’re catching on.”

  “Huh? Oh, I meant that the math problem I’m working on is complicated. You know that I multitask when I talking with you, Joe.”

  I sighed. “Great. Thank you, Skippy.”

  “Good talking with you too, Joe. What were we talking about again?”

  Still not having come up with an idea, I went to the gym. Playing solitaire hadn’t given me an idea, maybe lifting weights or running would help. It didn’t work. I ended my workout soaked with sweat, with my brain still not cooperating. Sergeant Adams walked into the gym as I was leaving and I stopped to talk with her. “It’s our turn to cook the day after tomorrow, do you have any ideas what to make for lunch?” We were making chicken pot pie for dinner, plus a vegetable puff pastry thing that Simms had a recipe for.

  She tilted her head. “We could make mock oyster soup, my grandmother used to make that,” she laughed.

  “Mock oyster soup?”

  “My grandmother said when she was little her family went through some lean times, so her mother made mock oyster soup from eggplant and milk and crackers or something like that. There are no oysters in it. It’s an old recipe, for us it became a family joke.”

  I laughed at that. “One time when we went camping, my father looked in the cooler and realized he had left the package of hot dogs at home. So he toasted the buns on a fire, put in a lot of cheese, onions and mustard, and we had ‘mock dogs’.”

  I was thinking of my father trying to convince us that, lacking hot dogs, we could each eat two mock dogs instead. My mother was not amused. And my sister and I had been looking forward to grilling hot dogs over a fire all day. Even when my father brought out a bag of marshmallows to roast on the fire, we were not happy. We wanted hot dogs, and were disappointed not to get them. When people decide that they want something, they aren’t happy when it isn’t available. Like when my family was not going for mock dogs, or-

  Holy shit.

  An idea hit me right then, right there in the corridor. “Adams, excuse me.” I ran down the corridor to Skippy’s escape pod, foregoing a shower for the moment. Ducking down to crawl in the tiny door, I plopped myself across two of the too-small seats. “Hey Skippy.”

  He made a sniffing sound. “You couldn’t have showered first? Whew,” he said in disgust.

  “No time for a shower, I have an idea I need to discuss with you.”

  “Does this idea involve you sealing yourself in a plastic bag to contain the monkey smell?”

  “No. First, I have a question. How do microwormholes work?”

  Silence. Then, “You’ve got to be kidding me, Joe. A microwormhole is simply a very small diameter wormhole. You barely understand how shoelaces work, and you want me to explain a wormhole to you?”

  “Very funny. And yes I do want you to explain it. You’re super smart, figure out a way to explain it to me.”

  “Joe, that is a mathematical question, and you don’t speak that language. Hell, Friedlander barely speaks enough math for me to talk to him about-”

  “No math, then. Break it down for me Barney style. Sorry for ruining the joke for you.”

  “I truly do not know where to start, Joe. You are asking me to explain the mechanics of what your species calls an Einstein-Rosen bridge-”

  “Why is it called that?”

  “Because,” Skippy said slowly like people do when explaining things to a toddler, “Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen discovered the mathematical basis of-”

  “No, I figured that, Skippy. I meant, why is it called a ‘bridge’?”

  “Oh. I think Einstein and Rosen used that term because a such a construct carries an object from one place to another, without going through the space between those two places. It’s a shortcut. Like a bridge can carry a person from one side of a river to another, without going through the river.”

  “But when you’re going across a bridge, you can look down and see the river,” I pointed out, proud of myself. “And it can take a long time to go across a bridge, so it’s not really a shortcut. Except it is faster than swimming, probably. If it’s a bridge, why do you call it a wormhole?”

  “I don’t call it a wormhole, your species calls it a wormhole, Joe. I’m just using the term-”

  “When a worm makes a hole in the ground, I’ll bet it seems like a really long way to the worm,” I mused. “The worm sure doesn’t think of it as a shortcut.”

  “Focus, Joey, focus! Please, please, try to focus. Oh, this is impossible. Impossible!” He sobbed quietly. “Joe, I’m going to stop talking to you now, and instead I will try explaining integral calculus to one of Major Simms’ tomato plants in the hydroponics farm. Because that will be a lot easier for me.”
>
  “Uh huh.” The too-small Thuranin seat was digging into my butt cheek, so I laid down across the seats. “How about this? Didn’t Einstein say that nothing could exceed the speed of light? Yet this ship travels faster than light.”

  “No it does not.”

  “Uh,” I paused to think, wary of making an even bigger fool of myself. “We go from one star to another faster than light can get there, Skippy.”

  “Yes, but we do not travel the distance between stars.”

  That puzzled me. “What’s the difference?”

  “We cheat, Joe. We use a traversable wormhole, which as I said your species calls an Einstein-Rosen bridge, to create a shortcut. Uh!” He cut off my next ignorant question. “If you want me to attempt to explain this, then kindly shut your pie hole. The two ends of a wormhole can be a lightyear apart in normal space, but going through a wormhole involves no distance at all. A wormhole creates a tunnel connecting two points in space, but the inside of the tunnel has no length at all. Think of a wormhole as a doorway. On one end of the doorway is Maine, the other side is in Australia. You go through the doorway, faster than light could travel from your home to the land Down Under. Actually, the length of a wormhole tunnel is not zero, but that is not something I can explain to monkeys; that kind of knowledge is too dangerous.”

  “Consider my mind blown, Skippy. All right, forget explaining how wormholes work. Answer this question: I know that you can send radio signals and maser beams through a microwormhole. Can you feed power through one also?”

  “Electrical power? Sure, that’s easy. It depends how much power you’re talking about, any microwormhole has a maximum throughput. And you’d have to be careful that the frequency of power transmitted does not match the microwormhole’s natural frequency. That could quickly create a resonance that would collapse the wormhole. Why do you want to feed power through a microwormhole?”

  “Skippy, maybe we don’t need to offer an Elder power tap to the Ruhar. Maybe we only needed them to think they had found an Elder power tap. A mock power tap.”

  “I’m not following you, Joe. You mean we create a fake one like we did on Newark? There have been plenty of inert power taps found across the galaxy, only a functioning one would be valuable enough to make the Ruhar want to retain control of Paradise. Besides, they would quickly analyze it and determine it is a fake.”

  “If the power tap generated power, that would convince them that it is real?”

  “You mean like we put a powercell inside the mockup power tap? That would only work until the powercell ran out. Also, the Ruhar would scan it and see that it’s a simple powercell.”

  “I do not mean a powercell. I mean we hide a microwormhole inside our fake power tap, and we feed the Dutchman’s reactor power through it. And you project some kind of stealth field through the wormhole, so the Ruhar’s scanning instruments won’t work on it.”

  “Huh,” Skippy said thoughfully.

  “Could we do that?”

  “Hmm. Let me think about it, Joe. I would need to move the wormhole to keep it centered in the mockup, and the Dutchman would need to be a long way from the mockup to keep up hidden. Although, hmm, data transmission though the wormhole is instantaneous, so signal lag would not be an issue. As long as the Ruhar didn’t move the mockup really fast, I could easily keep the wormhole centered in it. And I can project a stealth field through the wormhole also, to prevent the Ruhar from detecting the event horizon.”

  “What is an event hori-”

  “Never mind that. Let me guess what your monkey brain is thinking. We create a mockup here aboard the Dutchman, and I install one end of a microwormhole in it. The other end stays wrapped around a power conduit aboard the ship. We fly the mockup down to Paradise in a stealthed dropship, bury it, and let the Ruhar dig it up. They see that it is apparently generating impressive amounts of power, and they go bananas digging up Paradise to find another one. Hmmm. That could work, Joe. The only problem I see is that we could never leave. The Flying Dutchman and I would have to remain near Paradise, forever.”

  “No, Skippy. We can shut down the power tap at some point and go back to Earth.”

  “Won’t the Ruhar realize the scam at that point?”

  “No. Skippy, you’re thinking like a super smart AI. You need to think like a meat-brain biological trashbag. When it is time for us to leave, you increase the power throughput, and keep increasing it until the wormhole collapses. That should destroy the mockup, right?”

  “Quite thoroughly, yes. Won’t the Ruhar be suspicious of why their priceless power tap suddenly went haywire?”

  “No. Because like any other biological trashbags, they will not be able to resist screwing with their new toy. They’re going to try to scan it, and adjust it, and try to figure out how it works. And when it breaks, they’re going to blame themselves for screwing with it. Trust me on this. If something is working fine and you screw with it, and then it breaks, you will assume it broke because you screwed with it. Then you hope you can blame it on somebody else.”

  “Damn, being biological is complicated. However, while you were blah blah blah talking, I analyzed the psyche of the Ruhar and I must conclude that you are correct. There will be much second-guessing and recriminations about why their shiny new toy broke, but they will blame themselves. Then they will become even more determined to make up for their egregious screwup by retaining control of Paradise and finding more Elder goodies. Joe, I am completely impressed. Blown away, even. This may be the most diabolical idea your incredibly devious mind has cooked up yet. A brilliant career as a criminal mastermind awaits you after you are done playing soldier. Tell me, please, because I want to understand how you think up ideas that my brain can’t seem to create. How did you get this idea?”

  “I’ll explain when we serve mock dogs for lunch later this week.”

  When I explained the idea in a hastily-convened staff meeting right after talking with Skippy, everyone was relieved. And thrilled. Except Sergeant Adams, who always keeps me grounded in reality. “Sir,” she asked, “do I understand this correctly? We left Paradise behind, and flew all the way out here, risking our lives to find an Elder power tap that Skippy could fix. Now you tell us none of this would have been necessary, if you only had this idea back then?”

  “Um, yes?” I was suddenly on the defensive.

  “Next time, Colonel, can you make your brain work a little faster?”

  I smiled. “I can try, Adams, but this is all your fault.”

  With a skeptical tilt of her head, she asked “How do you figure that, sir?”

  “Because,” I said with a grin, “if you hadn’t waited so long to give me your grandmother’s recipe for mock oyster soup, we wouldn’t have come all the way out there.”

  Chotek came to see me in my office about an hour after the staff meeting. Fortunately, I had stopped to shower and put on a clean uniform. “Colonel, your idea to create a fake Elder power tap is commendable.”

  I waited for him to say ‘but’, because I knew that was coming next. In the staff meeting, he had seemed irritated that he had agreed to send us off on a fool’s errand to find a functioning power tap based on my advice. And now I was telling him that had been all for nothing, that if I had really thought through my idea, we would not have needed to leave the Paradise system.

  “I am concerned that providing only one power tap for the Ruhar to find is insufficient; the Ruhar know such devices are rare. When the one they find destroys itself, aren’t the Ruhar at least somewhat likely to conclude they found the only power tap on Paradise, and that there is nothing else there? In order to make the Ruhar desire to keep the planet, they must think it probable there are other Elder items of value buried beneath the surface.”

  Crap. Count freakin’ Chocula actually had a point. A good one. “Skippy?” I asked. “Could we make two fake power taps? Can you create and maintain two microwormholes?”

  “Please, Joe, you insult me,” Skippy’s voice had a s
coffing tone. “Easy-peasy. But I have been listening to your conversation, and it would be a terrible idea to create two fake Elder power taps. The Kristang already found a real power tap when they first came to Paradise, and functioning power taps are exceedingly rare. To find two of them on one planet is astonishing, to find three stretches belief. If the Ruhar found a third functioning power tap, Paradise would become a place worthy of the Thuranin and Jeraptha fighting over directly. It might even attract the attention of the Maxolhx and Rindhalu, and we must avoid that at all costs. Those two senior species may be able to figure out that our power taps were fake, and someone would start asking awkward questions.”

  “Got it,” I said with a shrug directed at Chotek. His expression dropped back into the mildly peeved look he usually had when dealing with me. I needed to somehow get this guy on my side. “Hey, sir, I do agree that we could sweeten the pot. Find something else to induce the Ruhar to keep Paradise. We could, uh, I don’t know. Find or fake some other Elder goodies?”

  “Goodies?” Chotek wasn’t buying into it.

  “I’m spitballing,” I said by way of explanation.

  Chotek looked completely confused. “A spit ball? How is this related to baseball?”

  “No, it’s,” how to explain American slang to a foreigner? Although I had to give an Austrian props for knowing American baseball terms. “That expression can refer to a baseball with spit on it. In this case, what I meant was to wad up a small piece of paper, spit on it, and throw it against a wall. Some of the pieces will stick, just like some ideas will stick; will be useful. It’s also called brainstorming?”

  “Ah, I understand,” his face brightened. “We are going to consider a variety of ideas, and hopefully find a set of possibilities that can be further developed into a feasible solution?”

  “Yes,” I agreed, thinking that Chotek would be loads of fun at parties. Not. “So, we need to think of something we can get, or fake, that is valuable. Or,” the wheels in my mind were spinning. “Something we already have.”

  “That is a great idea,” Skippy said in a mocking tone. “Hey, I know! How about we offer them something truly valuable; a box of cereal personally autographed by the Count himself. What a collector’s item!”