Mavericks

by Craig Alanson

  He sucked in a sharp breath. “Joe, that is a great idea. I do owe it to the universe to-”

  “Uh huh,” I interrupted before he could spiral into an endless loop of praising himself. “Since we monkeys can’t truly appreciate your awesomeness, we are not worthy of ranking your accomplishments.”

  “Joe, that is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. It is true that asking monkeys for input on ranking my awesomeness would be a waste of time,” he said slowly, pondering the issue. “Still, I suppose it would be-Hey, you big jerk! You’re smirking at me!”

  “That wasn’t a smirk, it was, uh, a smile.”

  “Ooooooooh, I hate you so much.”

  “Yup, great. So, getting back to my question, you plopped the far end of a wormhole on top of a ship and ripped it apart. We used a wormhole as a weapon. I didn’t think of it at the time, but doesn’t that violate some Elder rule or something? Why didn’t the Guardians protest about us doing it?”

  “Those pain-in-the-ass Guardians did protest, Joe, they threw a full-blown diva-queen hissy fit. Later, I mean. Right after it happened, the Guardians were sort of paralyzed with shock and amazement. Hee hee, that was freakin’ hilarious! Their first reaction was ‘WTF was that’? They couldn’t believe it. See, even devices created by the Elders think my awesomeness is beyond comprehension. They were all like ‘How did you do that’ and I was like ‘easy’ and they were all like ‘Duuuuuude that has never been done before’ and I was like ‘I make the impossible seem ordinary’ and they were like-”

  “Skippy!” I had to interrupt him or he would have gone on forever. Hearing the arrogant beer can sounding like an airhead teenage girl was going to make me burst out laughing if he continued. “You answered my question, thank you. I’m going on duty, I’ll talk with you in about five hours in my office, Ok? We can think up ideas to rescue Paradise, again.”

  “Oh, this is going to suuuuck,” Skippy the drama queen dragged out the last word as he popped to life above my office desk.

  “Why’s that?” I asked, knowing I would regret asking. With Skippy, you had to play along, or he would pester you until you did. For a human, I considered myself pretty stubborn, even for a guy, but I knew not to try outlasting a being whose stubbornness was powered by metallic helium-3.

  “Why?” he sputtered. “Joe, we have to find a single, tiny ship in the vastness of space!”

  “Yeah, I was thinking about that while I was on duty.” Thinking about how to rescue Paradise from a horrible bioweapon was more pleasant than worrying about the perilous mission our dropships would be flying to pick up fuel. “Since you’re a beer can, I assume you never played Marco Polo when you were a kid?”

  “Marco P-What? Do you mean some sort of lame role-playing game like that Warhammer thing you used to play? Or, hey, are you talking about an alt-rock band?”

  “Uh, neither. And Warhammer isn’t lame,” I added in defense of my younger self.

  “The way you played was lame,” Skippy chuckled. “Remember the time you tried to impress a girl by dressing up as-”

  “Let’s not talk about that now,” I said hurriedly while sipping coffee. “No, I mean Marco Polo as in the game you play in a swimming pool.”

  “Oh. Yes, I know about that game, but I considered it the most lame of all possibilities involving the phrase ‘Marco Polo’. How does a silly children’s game relate to our current problem?”

  “It’s going to solve our problem, at least I hope so.”

  “Ok, you’ve lost me again. Please, I am begging the village idiot to enlighten me.”

  “In the game, one person finds other people not by looking for them, but by calling out ‘Marco’.”

  “Technically, one person shouting ‘Marco’ is not how that person finds the others. The other people give away their positions by stupidly calling out ‘Polo’. If those people just kept quiet, they could hide forever and-Oooh. Now I get it. Uh, nope. No, I don’t. Joe, ‘Polo’ does sound like a word in the Kristang common language, but that word is a technical term about electrical energy. I don’t see how that helps us.”

  “Skippy, come on. Seriously, you don’t know where I’m going with this? It is totally obvious.”

  “Obvious to an idiot meatsack, maybe,” he sniffed.

  “Ok, listen, somehow, you send out a message from the Black Trees, or from Silver Blade clan leadership, requesting that ship to signal its position. Get it? You will sort of yell ‘Marco’ and they will reply ‘Polo’. We locate that ship, and BAM,” I smacked a fist into a palm. “We pound it to dust.”

  He sighed. “Joe, of all the dumb ideas you ever had, and there are an impressive stack of them, this has to be the-”

  “I know, greatest, right? Ooh ooh!” I shouted excitedly and bounced in my chair because right then I got another idea that was EVEN BETTER. “Wait! If you can signal that ship, don’t just tell it to report its position, you somehow give it a recall order. Yeah! Send it home, tell it the clan leadership changed its mind, or, I don’t know, decided to save those infected Keepers for a rainy day or something.”

  “Joe.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you done smacking me with your brilliant ideas?”

  “I have a full mug of coffee here, Skippy, so my brain is awake. I am firing on all cylinders today, more brilliant ideas may be coming.”

  “Ok. First, somehow I send a retrieval code, or a request for that ship to report its position? Somehow? Like, how?”

  “I don’t know,” I waved a hand vaguely. “However you do magical shit like that.”

  “Joe, how I do magical shit like that is getting the codes from somewhere first. I have no idea what private authentication codes were provided to that ship. There are two places I could get such codes. First, we could go poking around in databases of the Silver Blade clan leaders, I would have to do a lot of poking around to find the one specific code we need.”

  The coffee in my mouth suddenly tasted sour. “That is not an option, what else you got?”

  “The matching set of codes would, of course, be aboard the ship we’re searching for. All we need to do is find that ship, which is the problem we’re trying to solve you DUMDUM!”

  As Skippy would say, UGH, in that thoroughly disgusted sigh he does. I won’t bore you with details of every stupid idea I dreamed up and discarded on my own. Or the plans I thought were good enough to review with Skippy, before he shot them down like easy targets in a video game. Seriously, we monkeys trying to think up ways to find a single ship in the vastness of space around the Paradise system accomplished nothing of use, but man, I sure kept Skippy tickled pink. He came up with fresh new insults, and I had him chuckling and feeling good, which I suppose was good, considering how glum he had been after we almost got killed by an Elder energy virus he hadn’t known about.

  Since we weren’t getting anything useful done, I decided to take a two hour break for lunch and a quick workout in the gym. It was late, because we had worked through the standard lunch time, so the duty crew in the galley was tidying up and our options were limited to soup or sandwiches. That was Ok with me, I hadn’t eaten a good deli sandwich in a while and this was an opportunity to make one just the way I like it.

  “Oh, man,” I groaned with my mouth watering, “that is almost too many choices.” Adams and I were standing back, letting other people go through the line first. The crew on duty in the galley that day was from the American SpecOps team, and they had laid out a great selection of meats and cheeses. They even had cappicola, although I didn’t see any mortadella, but being so far from Earth I was amazed we had anything other than bologna for sandwiches. “It’s impossible to decide what to put on a sandwich. Mmm, they made fresh sub rolls!”

  “Sir,” Adams gave me that look sergeants use on dumbass new recruits who don’t know one end of a rifle from the other. “First, imagine what kind of sandwich you want, then you see what ingredients you have to work with.”

  “Holy shit, Gunny,”
I stared at her, my mouth open in stunned amazement. “I need to work the problem backwards.”

  “It’s not that complicated, Sir. Wait, where are you going?” She asked, but I was already on the way out the door.

  Plopping down in my office chair, I tried to erase tantalizing visions of a piled-high deli sandwich from my mind. “Hey, Skippy, what if we’ve been going about this all wrong?”

  “Ooooh, well, it’s about freakin’ time,” his avatar popped to life on my desk. “I’ve been waiting for you monkeys to realize that I should be captain of this ship, not you. Although, really, it would best if you were to worship my awesomeness, maybe build a shrine-”

  “After you got us stuck in the Roach Motel, the only shrine we would build is to your most idiotic moments. No, I meant, what if we’ve have been thinking about how to find this ship backwards?”

  “Backwards?” He sighed. “Again, Joe, you’ve lost me with your monkey-brained thinking. Do you propose we first assume we have a way to find that ship, and work backwards from-”

  “No, because that truly would be stupid. I mean backwards, like, how do the Kristang plan to infect humans on Paradise? They must have a plan better than landing a dropship full of infected Keepers outside a human town in southern Lemuria, and the Keepers walk out and say ‘take us to your leader’. We should start by trying to figure out the Kristang plan, then work backwards to determine how the Kristang would implement that plan.”

  His avatar placed a hand on its chin pensively. “Hmmm, that idea actually does have merit.”

  “Ok,” I gave him a thumbs up sign as my stomach growled from hunger. “A large group of Keepers suddenly popping up in a thinly-populated area would stick out like a sore thumb,” I waggled a thumb at the avatar. “So the Kristang would likely be flying a stealthed dropship around the bush at night, dropping off Keepers in ones and twos,” I was thinking aloud to myself. “In a small village even one new person would be noticed, so they would target towns with significant populations. Skippy, can you calculate a flight pattern-”

  “Joe! How about we assume you invited me here because you want my advice?”

  “Uh, Ok?”

  “Great. So, instead of you wasting time ignorantly speculating how the Kristang might infiltrate Keepers, you ask me how they would do it?”

  “Um, sure, let’s do that.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. By what must be a true miracle, you stumbled onto a minor fact that must be accurate; the Kristang would target larger towns in southern Lemuria so the infected Keepers can better blend in and encounter a large number of humans to infect. They would target human towns with regular trade with Ruhar, to better transfer the pathogen to the Ruhar population. That allows us to identify the most likely target areas are large towns with air fields or seaports. All of that is fantastic information, and pretty much useless to us. The Ruhar authorities on Paradise, who are not numbskulls like you, would have used the same logic I just did. By now, they have surely locked down all travel between the human settlements in southern Lemuria and the rest of the planet. Your UNEF HQ would be smart to also impose a travel ban between settlements, to lessen the danger of infection spreading.”

  “Yeah, that’s all great, but once the first human or Ruhar shows signs of infection, the Ruhar military will step in and take matters into their own hands. We have to kill that ship before a bunch of infected Keepers can land.”

  “I know that, Joe. What I am trying to tell you is, the Kristang would not simply fly around in a stealthed dropship to insert the Keepers. The strategic defense and sensor network around Paradise is incomplete, shamefully inadequate, because the Ruhar federal government has put far too much effort into developing real estate rather than building defenses. However, I would expect the Ruhar fleet to reinforce the network above southern Lemuria. A stealthed dropship could insert over an area with poor sensor coverage and then fly to the target area, but that is risky and inefficient. I expect the Kristang would have to use two or more unmanned stealth dropships as decoys, but not for infiltration. Using dropships at all is too risky. Based on data recovered by the Mavericks, I believe the Kristang plan to get Keepers to the surface by dropping them inside stealthed aeroshells.”

  “Crap. Like how we got down to Jumbo?” Our spacedive and descent to the surface of that heavy-gravity world is not one of my fondest memories.

  “Exactly, Joe. The Kristang Special Forces have excellent equipment for dropping small teams of soldiers to the surface of worlds with adequately thick atmospheres. Their aeroshells use a combination of stealth and suspensor fields, plus nanofabric balloons and paragliders. Considering the overall crappy state of Kristang technology, their capability for infiltration of ground troops is impressive. They utilize that capability often for raids and assassinations against other clans.”

  “That sucks. Wait,” I snapped my fingers. “At Jumbo, we dropped in the middle of a meteor shower, to confuse the Thuranin sensors.”

  “Correct, and the Kristang are no doubt planning to do something similar, to conceal the Keepers’ descent. The Paradise system has a large asteroid belt and a particularly dense Oort cloud, so the planet is regularly bombarded by meteor showers.”

  “At Jumbo, we dropped meteors on purpose, we diverted space rocks to fall ahead and behind us. But around Paradise, the Ruhar must have a pretty good map of all the space junk in that system, right? If the Kristang nudged some rocks off course, the Ruhar would notice?”

  “The Ruhar did make an extensive effort to map the system out to five percent of a lightyear, and the fleet now maintains that sensor network, yes. Why does that matter?”

  “Because, Skippy,” I explained hopefully, “the Kristang will know that. They must be planning to infiltrate those Keepers during a regular, natural meteor shower.”

  “Hmm, Joe, that is good thinking. I am sufficiently impressed that I am suppressing my urge to mock your intelligence.”

  “Great!” That didn’t make up for me missing a delicious sandwich, but I counted it as a win anyway. “Tell me, Oh Great and Wise One, have there been any meteor showers over southern Lemuria recently? And when will there be meteors hitting there in, like, the next couple months?” Under the desk, I crossed my fingers, praying there had not recently been a meteor shower there, so the Keepers hadn’t landed yet.

  “Hmmm,” he took off his ridiculously oversized admiral’s hat and scratched his head. “Accessing the data now. Oops, looks like there were meteor showers over the target area six days ago, and twenty seven days ago.”

  “Ahhhhhh, shit,” I slumped in my chair. The damned Keepers might already be on the surface! “Damn it!” Raising a fist, I intended to slam it on the desk in frustration, but Skippy’s avatar held up a hand to stop me.

  “Hold your horses, Joe. Don’t be so hasty, you haven’t heard all the facts. That meteor fall twenty seven days ago is too early, the Kristang could not have arrived here from Camp Alpha so quickly. Unless their Bosphuraq star carrier flew a very quick route and took substantial risks by using shortcuts through enemy territory.”

  “Paradise is enemy territory for the Bosphuraq, Skippy,” I noted in a grump mood.

  “Yes, dumdum, but what I meant is, for a star carrier to arrive at the Paradise system before the meteor shower twenty seven days ago, that ship would need to use Elder wormholes in heavily-trafficked areas of Jeraptha space. I do not think an operation to kill humans on Paradise is important enough for the Bosphuraq to risk one of their star carriers.”

  “Ok,” I breathed a quick sigh of relief. Quick, because I was waiting for Skippy to deliver the bad news. “There was another meteor shower six days ago.”

  “Correct. However, that particular meteor shower is very old, it is composed of dust from a comet that broke apart seventy thousand years ago. The remnants of that comet are tiny particles of dust, Joe. The biggest space rock from that comet would only create a micrometeorite, nothing large enough to provide concealment for a team of
Keepers dropping to the surface in stealthed aeroshells.”

  “Oh,” I sat back in my chair again, but this time I wasn’t slumped in defeat, I was staring at the ceiling, trying to understand what Skippy’s revelation meant. “Ok, then. So, if the Kristang do plan on using aeroshells to land the Keepers-”

  “You can count on it, Joe. Data collected from Camp Alpha by Colonel Perkins contains records of Keepers being trained to perform drops from orbit, using aeroshells. This training included seven drops, so it was an extensive project to which the Kristang devoted considerable resources.”

  “All right. So, you know my next question, right?”

  “When is the next meteor shower over southern Lemuria? That will be eight days from now. After that, there will not be another significant shower for sixty seven days. Joe, if I were a betting man, or a betting can,” he chuckled, “I would put my money on the Keepers dropping in eight days. After another two months, the Ruhar will surely have increased their defenses and sensor coverage over southern Lemuria. And no way would the Bosphuraq want one of their star carriers to hang around Paradise for two freakin’ months.”

  “Eight days? We can get there in four days, you said?”

  “Yes. Joe, that leaves only four days for us to locate and kill that ship. We still have the problem of finding a single stealthed ship in the Paradise system. Having a good guess when they plan to drop the Keepers still doesn’t help us much.”

  “Yes it does, Skippy. You need to think like a meatsack. Remember when we were spacediving toward Jumbo, and you read that stupid freakin’ book to me?”

  “The book was a true masterpiece, Joe. If you like, I can start again at Chapter One ‘Why I Hate Your Stupid Ugly Face’.”

  “Please don’t! My point, Oh Incomprehensibly Awesome One,” I rolled my eyes as I said that, “is because the Keepers are meatsacks, the Kristang will have to limit the time they are stuck inside aeroshells. Believe me, even the most disciplined fanatics will become mission ineffective after two days cooped up in one of those shells.”