Paradise (Expeditionary Force Book 3)

by Craig Alanson

  “Skippy,” my protest was marred by me choking to unsuccessfully suppress a laugh. It came out my nose and threw me into a coughing fit. Chotek’s red face didn’t help me regain my composure. “That was not-” even I couldn’t tell him it wasn’t funny. Because it was. “That wasn’t called for.”

  “I am terribly, terribly sorry,” Skippy said with a chuckle. He didn’t sound sorry at all.

  “What about,” I said slowly.

  “Oh, crap,” Skippy grumbled. “Get ready, Chocula, this is where the magic happens. I use the term ‘magic’ because there is no logical reason for why Joe’s brain has ever come up with even one good idea.”

  “Uh huh,” I ignored him. “We have two Elder comm nodes. The one we picked up when we raided that Kristang asteroid to get our wormhole controller, and the one we took from those scavengers on Newark. Skippy, do the Ruhar or whoever know what a comm node is?”

  “They know that the devices were intended for communications, yes. Joe, comm nodes are not particularly rare in the galaxy, and they are not considered very valuable. And in case you were not paying attention, our two comm nodes do not work.”

  “What if they did?”

  “Damn it! See, this is what drives me absolutely crazy!” Skippy fairly shouted in frustration, and the sides of Chotek’s mouth curled up in a brief smile. “I have all the information that you have, I have way more information that you have. In terms of brain power, my brain is a supergiant star, and yours is a raisin. A small, dried-up moldy old raisin. I should be able to figure out what you are going to suggest, but I can’t! I just can’t! Aaargh! I hate my life. This is so unfair.” He broke down into gentle, defeated sobbing.

  “Skippy?” I asked. “Do you want to hear my idea?”

  “Go ahead,” he sighed. “The more unique ideas that I hear, the more data I collect for figuring out how your monkey brain works. And when I do, be prepared for utter, abject humiliation, Joe.”

  “I am looking forward to it. Listen, those comm nodes don’t work because they don’t connect to the network, or there is no network, right? That’s what we’re guessing?”

  “Sure,” Skippy admitted. “Those two possibilities, or it could be that I don’t have the proper network access codes. The Collective secret handshake, sort of.”

  “Fair enough. If the comm nodes did work, they would be super valuable, because signals travel between comm nodes instantaneously, and no current species has faster than light communications?”

  “Not exactly true, but close enough for the purpose of this conversation. Yes, a working comm node would be a valuable item. Is your idea a way to make our comm nodes work, Joe? Because if you could truly do that, I would worship at your feet. I would hate myself until the end of time, but I would do it.”

  “No, Skippy, my idea is to run another scam on the Ruhar. Can you put the two ends of a microwormhole inside our two comm nodes? That way a signal going in one comm node would travel faster than light to the other one. We could put one comm node on Paradise, and have the other, um, floating out in space somewhere in the Paradise system. That would make it real obvious to the Ruhar that the signal transit time is instantaneous. Oooh,” another thought hit me. “And we should have the two comm nodes activate and start pinging each other at the same time the Ruhar uncover the fake power tap. Later, when we blow up the fake power tap, the comm nodes will stop working at the same time.” I sat back in my chair, pleased with myself. “Would that work?”

  “See, Chocula?” Skippy said. “I’ve said before that Joe is an evil genius, and I meant it. Joe, that is a brilliant idea. Damn it! I still have no idea how you dream up stuff that I should have thought of. Maybe my deviousness subroutine is offline. Yes, Joe, that would work. Wow! As a bonus, pretending there is a remote connection between the power tap and the comm nodes would set back the study of Elder technology by centuries. And having a backup to the fake power tap would be much more convincing to the Ruhar. That was your idea, Chotek, so your name has just been added to my ‘Skippy hates you’ list.”

  I grinned and to my surprise, Chotek was beaming with pride. He reached across the table to shake my hand. “My understanding,” Chotek addressed Skippy with a wink to me, “is that your list is a rather exclusive club. So, please Mr. Skippy, hate me as much as you like.”

  Damn. Maybe Chocula was human after all.

  We flew straight back to Paradise, then I went down to the surface in a dropship with Skippy, Desai, Major Smythe and a half dozen special forces. Smythe and his team planted our mock power tap and one of our mock comm nodes near a Ruhar-controlled projector one night. We had a brief moment of anxiety when we thought Smythe had been detected, but it was a false alarm. Back in the dropship, Skippy confirmed everything was ready, so we waited. And waited. We waited for the Ruhar to notice the fabulous goodies that were right on their doorstep. Damn, those hamsters could be dense sometimes.

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  Baturnah Logellia hurried back down the hallway to her office, determined not to be late for her next meeting. She had just ended an hour-long meeting about the scarcity of critical medical supplies; a meeting during which she could not offer even a guess when the Ruhar fleet would resume escorting cargo ships to Gehtanu. The cease fire, the current cease fire, was holding. Ground troops of both sides were staying in their designated zones, and both sides had stopped attempts to reactivate or destroy projectors.

  No one expected the Kristang to remain inactive for long.

  Her next meeting had been squeezed onto her calendar that very morning, at the request of the Chief Administrator. Baturnah would have appreciated more advanced notice, but as the Deputy Administrator, she did as her boss requested.

  Waiting in her office was Tohn Logen, a senior engineer who had come to Gehtanu to maintain the planet’s six reactors. He had come to Gehtanu, expecting to remain for five years, and then he had gotten stuck on the planet when the wormhole shift occurred and the Kristang arrived. Baturnah liked Tohn, he was always cheery and pleasant; he also always let it be known that he couldn’t wait to leave the backwater planet. Why meeting with Tohn that morning was so important, Baturnah couldn’t imagine, although she braced herself for bad news. Reactors shutting down due to lack of spare parts? Some other infrastructure problem? No, Tohn had been investigating a projector for the past week. Bad news about those?

  “Administrator,” Tohn stood as she came into the office. He offered her the palm-sliding handshake typical of the Ruhar, and after exchanging greetings, she asked him to sit. He did, after closing her office door and making sure it was securely shut.

  “Would you like klah?” She offered the Ruhar’s favorite hot beverage.

  “No, I’ve been living on klah the past few days.”

  “Surely you didn’t have to fly all the way here to talk with me,” she said. The man looked tired, like he hadn’t slept in days. “I have been following your reports about the projectors.”

  “Yes,” he said wearily. “We have made considerable progress; our initial assumption that the projectors were installed by the Kristang have been confirmed.”

  “It is greatly troubling that we lived here for so long, with those projectors practically under our feet, and we knew nothing about them.”

  You lived here with them, Tohn thought to himself. I just work here. Then he regretted his uncharitable thought. Gehtanu had become his home sometime along the way. “It is troubling,” he agreed with a nod. “Administrator, I will get straight to the point. Four days ago, we were examining a projector; one of those used in the initial attack. It was depleted of energy, so we considered it a good candidate for close inspection. As I said, we confirmed it was manufactured and installed by Kristang. While we were conducting a scan of the area, we detected, something. Then we picked up an energy signature that wasn’t there before. We believe that somehow our scans caused a dormant object to activate. It was half buried, unfortunately the people who recovered it did not take the time
to preserve the site, so we have lost the ability to determine how it got there, or how long it had been in that spot. The reason that I came here to speak with you in person is the sensitive nature of what we discovered.” He paused to take a breath, and his face came alive. Whatever deep weariness he was feeling fell away. “It is an Elder power tap. And this one is functioning perfectly.”

  “An Elder power tap? Functional?” Baturnah Logellia asked, stunned. “It is producing power?”

  Tohn nodded, and Baturnah could feel his excitement. “It has a steady output of roughly twenty four kilowatts. We hooked it up to a capacitor, and it was putting out three megawatts and climbing rapidly before we disconnected it. We were afraid the power flow would blow the capacitor and damage the power tap.”

  “This is incredible. Astonishing.”

  Tohn agreed. “We can hardly believe it, and we’re working with it. Administrator, that is not all we found.”

  “Another power tap?” Her mind was spinning.

  “I wish,” Tohn shook his head, but retained a wide grin. “That would be asking too much of fate. No, what we found is potentially almost as valuable. We think we have a functioning pair of Elder communications nodes.”

  “A pair?” She guessed at the significance of the word he had used. “They’re linked?”

  “Yes, two of them. We found one here, close to where the power tap was buried. When the power tap became active, we detected signals beneath the ground, and discovered a comm node. We sent a signal through it, hoping there might be another one nearby. When we didn’t get a response, we were about to set it aside to look at later,” as so many comm nodes had proven to be useless junk. “Then we received a signal from Commodore Ferlant. They detected our signal eighty seven light minutes away, on the other side of the star. There is another comm node out there, floating in space. Administrator, it is linked to the comm node here. Signals pass both ways through the comm nodes, instantaneously.”

  “Faster than light?”

  “Better. As I said, the signal transmission is instantaneous. Zero time lag. As you can imagine, Commodore Ferlant is extremely excited. He has the other comm node aboard a ship, and they are bringing it here. It will be a slow trip; we are concerned that a jump would break the connection between nodes, so the ship is traveling through normal space.”

  “Is there any bandwidth restriction?”

  Tohn Logen grinned. “Not that we can detect yet. It seems to be unlimited.” The Ruhar had experimented with quantum entanglement for remote communications, but the pairing was short-lived, and the bandwidth so narrow that the technology was almost useless for practical communications.

  “Why would one node be in space, and another down here?” Baturnah asked, puzzled.

  “My guess? I think both nodes were aboard an Elder starship.” It was known that an Elder starship had crashed on Gehtanu; salvaging that wreck was the reason the Black Tree clan of the Kristang had originally come to the planet. “Before the ship’s orbit degraded, it ejected one of the nodes; the other remained aboard the ship.”

  Baturnah leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, savoring the moment. Her planet, her home, now possessed one of the most valuable objects in the galaxy. And not just a power tap. Gehtanu was now home to a working pair of comm nodes. “Forgive me, this is rather incredible.”

  “I feel the same way. When I first heard about it, I assumed that someone had misidentified an artifact. Or that we had found yet another nonfunctional object, that would sit in a laboratory as a curiosity. It wasn’t that I was afraid to hope we had truly found a functional power tap; I simply did not believe it could be true. Even now, I can barely believe it.”

  “This does answer a question,” she said with a smile that teased up one side of her mouth.

  “What is that?”

  “The question of who told the humans about the projectors. Major Perkins and her team thought their information came from a group of native Ruhar who knew we planned to trade away this planet.” She chose her words carefully, because Tohn had not been born on Gehtanu and did not consider the planet to be his home. To him, Gehtanu was a backwater world that was nothing more than a necessary assignment to further his career; a step on a ladder. Once he stepped above Gehtanu, he did not intend to ever return. If the wormhole shift had not happened, the Kristang would never have taken the planet back, and Tohn would have moved onto a new and better assignment years before. Moved away, and missed a discovery that would make his reputation and career. “That explanation never made sense to us. Major Perkins may have legitimately thought she was dealing with native Ruhar, I don’t doubt that. You finding a power tap provides a more likely story,” she said. She knew that Tohn himself had not discovered the power tap, had not even been the person who recognized its potential. But the man would now be moving up in the hierarchy, and Baturnah knew it paid to flatter such people and cultivate their friendship. “I believe that the Mysterious Benefactor who revealed the projectors to Perkins was not Ruhar at all. I think it was Kristang.”

  Tohn snorted skeptically. “The Kristang are a fractious species, but why would they attack their own ships?”

  “Not their ships,” she explained. “That battlegroup belongs to the Swift Arrow clan. We now know that the projectors were installed by the Black Tree clan, before our people came here, and long before the Swift Arrows first arrived following the wormhole shift. I suspect there is a Black Tree agent aboard one of the Swift Arrow ships. One of the ships that was not hit by a projector, of course.”

  “That makes some bit of sense,” Tohn agreed. “The Kristang are more passionate about fighting each other than they are about fighting us. But what would the Black Trees gain from helping us keep Gehtanu?”

  “Their goal is not to help us; it is to prevent the Swift Arrows from gaining an advantage. The Swift Arrows must have suspected that after the Black Trees left, there were still valuable Elder artifacts on Gehtanu. I do not think the Swift Arrows would have sent a battlegroup here because our climate is good for agriculture,” she added with sarcasm. “The Black Trees knew Gehtanu still held secrets, and they must have been afraid of a rival clan gaining an advantage. The Black Trees weren’t worried about us finding Elder artifacts; because they knew that we stopped looking for them a long time ago. We got lucky finding that power tap; we weren’t looking for it.”

  Tohn shrugged, admitting she was right.

  “Recognizing the value of an accidental discovery,” she said to soothe the man’s ego, “can be more important than a deliberate search.”

  “Administrator, you really think the Black Trees did this because they preferred the risk of us having that power tap, than for it to be possessed by a rival clan?”

  “I do. Although I think it more likely that the Black Trees expected we would never find it. Then, someday when circumstances change, the Black Trees could take an opportunity to come back here themselves. Our intelligence reports that currently, the Black Trees are busy preparing for a major civil war against the Fire Dragon clan. The Black Trees lack the resources right now to mount a campaign to retake this planet. That will not always be the case.”

  Tohn shook his head slowly in astonishment. “This damned war has gone on for so long that I am no longer surprised by anything the Kristang do. If you’re right about this, then our fleet needs to establish a permanent, strong presence here.” Gehtanu would be the focus of major efforts to recover Elder artifacts, likely for a generation or more. Researchers would come to the planet, bolstering the population and industrial infrastructure. Gehtanu and its secrets would become a high-value target for the enemy; certainly the fleet would need to station a battlegroup there, or more. Starship servicing facilities would need to be built in orbit, and once those facilities were established the fleet would rotate battlegroups through; maintaining a constant presence. The Jeraptha were likely to station ships in the area also. The Ruhar would install their own hidden projectors. The planet would be surrounded
by a cloud of stealth hunter-killer satellites. And satellites that could project a damping field to trap enemy ships. Gehtanu would soon have the defenses of a high-population planet. Once those defenses were in place, the federal government would want to maximize the return on their investment, so they would encourage people to move there. More people would require more infrastructure which required people to build infrastructure, creating a cycle. Sleepy agricultural Gehtanu was on the verge of experiencing booming growth. At some point, whether they found more functional Elder artifacts there would become irrelevant to the status of the planet.

  “Kahling knows?” Baturnah asked.

  “Yes,” Tohn nodded, “I told him late last night, after Commodore Ferlant’s coded message arrived. The Chief Administrator asked me to tell you personally as soon as possible this morning.”

  Now she regretted not telling her staff to move her morning appointments around so she could speak with Tohn sooner. “Has the Federal government been informed yet?” She asked. It was too soon yet for the government on the Ruhar homeworld to know about the astonishing developments on Gehtanu; Commodore Ferlant would need to dispatch a ship to carry the message to a passing Jeraptha star carrier. Her question was whether the federal government’s representatives on Gehtanu had been informed. The discovery of a working power tap would surely cause the federal government to cancel negotiations to hand the planet to the Kristang. Discovery of working comm nodes would do the same. The fact that both precious items had been found on Gehtanu would send a shockwave through the government. The first thing that Baturnah expected to happen would be for the Ruhar fleet to arrive, in force. She expected two, possibly three full battlegroups to take up position over the planet. After Ruhar ships filled the skies, only then would the discovery be announced to the public. “What?” She asked, reacting to the strange smile on Tohn’s face.