Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  Chotek insisted we perform an intermediate jump to recon the site, which he thought allowed us to avoid unpleasant surprises, but in my opinion actually increased our risk. The longer we remained in that star system, the more time we were exposed to danger. An intermediate jump created two additional gamma ray bursts that could be detected by any unexpected ships or sensor platforms in the area, giving away our position. It was an old and familiar argument; what is the value of tactical surprise? In Army training, and in some of my officer training PowerPoint slides, I had learned official Army doctrine on the subject, and some of the history that doctrine was based on. One of my instructors had focused on Operation Avalanche, the Allied invasion of Salerno Italy in WWII: General Mark Clark had decided not to soften up German defenses with a naval bombardment, in order to achieve surprise. It hadn’t worked; the Germans knew the effective range of our aircraft flying from bases in Sicily, and they figured Salerno was the most likely spot for the Allies to come ashore. That instructor thought Clark had been foolish at Salerno, but later during Operation Shingle at Anzio the Allies had conducted a short preparatory bombardment, only to find little resistance onshore. Of course, later that year at Normandy, those beaches had been pounded by aircraft and naval gunfire before the first troops landed from the sea on D-Day. In the plan we developed for raiding Bravo, my thinking was we gained nothing and risked much in lingering around that star system any longer than needed. But, orders were orders, so I instructed Skippy to plot an intermediate jump.

  First, we had to get to the Bravo star system. On the chart I had on my laptop, plotting a course there looked simple and we could get there quickly using only three Elder wormholes. Even with our jump drive in bad shape, I expected the voyage would not take more than two weeks. Skippy burst my happy bubble. “Ha ha, no way, dude,” he chuckled. “This trip will take a month, if we’re lucky. Ah!” He shushed me. “Let me explain before you ask a bunch of stupid questions. First, before we go anywhere, I need to take the jump drive offline to swap out and recalibrate a bunch of coils. After all the quick jumping we did at Barsoom, I discovered a potentially dangerous resonance in the drive; we need to fix that before jumping again. I’ll leave just enough coils in place for one emergency jump, of course; the rest of the coils will be getting work done on them for three to four days. After that, we’ll be good to jump, but not using the nice happy fairy tale course you plotted. That second wormhole you plan to use? Fuggedabouit,” he muttered using his best Wise Guy voice. “That wormhole sees constant, heavy traffic by Thuranin ships, especially now their borders have been pushed back by the Jeraptha. One end of that wormhole is a major fleet shipyard and staging base supporting the entire sector. Ordinarily, that would not be a problem, because I could adjust that wormhole to open a new emergence point for our exclusive use. Now that I am currently, as you say, Skippy the Meh-”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “You did mean that, Joe, and you are right about it. Compared to my usually incredibly magnificent awesomeness, I am now merely ‘Meh’. Anyway, I can’t screw with wormholes right now so we have to wait in line at normal emergence points. Yes, there are a whole lot of emergence points, but the risk is too great for us to hang around a heavily-trafficked wormhole. To be safe, we will have to go through four wormholes, not three. So, it will take us a month to get to Bravo. Thirty three days, to be more specific. We might be able to chop one or two days off that schedule, if the retuned jump drive behaves, and the wormhole emergence points line up optimally.”

  “Fine.” I was not going to attempt persuading Chotek that we should try running the shorter, more dangerous route to Bravo, both because I knew he would say no, and because I didn’t want to try it. Any time Skippy considered something to be too risky, I didn’t argue with him.

  "Hey, Joe, whatcha doing?" Skippy's avatar popped to life while I was sitting in my office, poking around on my laptop.

  "Nothing much. Just trying to think of something good to cook during our next shift in the galley. I’m meeting the team in ten minutes, and Adams looks at me like I'm not pulling my weight if I don't have two or three suggestions."

  "Uh huh. That, plus you nearly sliced off a thumb peeling carrots last time. Who does that?"

  "It was an accident, Skippy. Anyway, hey, maybe you can help me. The French team served a soup two weeks ago, and I was thinking we could make something like it, but spice it up a bit. I searched, but I can't find a recipe for it anywhere."

  "Maybe I can help. What is it?"

  "They called it 'de jour soup'."

  "De j-" Skippy's voice faded. "Joe, do you mean 'Soup de jour'?"

  "Yeah, that's it. They made it twice, but, hmm, it was different the first time."

  "Hooooh-leee- O.M.G! Joe, you are so ignorant. 'Soup de jour' is French for 'soup of the day'!" He laughed uproariously.

  "Is not."

  Silence.

  "Crap. Are you screwing with me?"

  "Sadly, no," Skippy chuckled.

  "Now I really feel like an idiot."

  "How could you tell?"

  "Oh shut up."

  The cooking team I was assigned to, which included Sergeant Adams, was planning menus for our next duty shift in the galley. The hardest part of the job wasn’t the cooking, or the prep work or the cleaning up; it was getting a team of people to agree what should be on the menu. We not only needed to think of something different so we didn’t repeat menu items too often, we also had to coordinate with the other teams, to avoid making something too similar two days in a row. The rotation had our turn in the galley the day after the French team, and the day before the Chinese team. We knew the French would be offering Beef Burgundy, plus a pasta dish and a vegetarian something or other. We also had to consider the slowly-dwindling supply of food we had in the cargo bays, and Major Simms’s desire that we use up certain items that did not deal as well with long-term storage. “We have lots of potatoes,” I commented while looking at the inventory list. “How about poutine for lunch?”

  “Poo-what?” Adams asked.

  “Poo-teen,” I pronounced. “It’s a Canadian thing, but we eat it up north also. You take French fries, add cheese curds, and cover it with gravy.”

  Adams stuck her tongue out. “No offense, Sir, but that sounds disgusting.”

  “Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Think of the cheese curds like mozzarella,” I saw mozzarella on the inventory but no cheese curds. Maybe we could make our own cheese curds? We had plenty of milk. No, that was too much work. “The dish is like, uh, Canadian nachos?” I explained. “Good hearty food in the winter.”

  “Sound like a way to make the fries soggy. I like crispy fries,” Adams noted.

  “Fine. Can we make poutine as a side dish for lunch?”

  “Sure,” Adams agreed, and Chang had no opinion on the subject.

  “For dinner, how about Chicken Cordon Blue?” Adams suggested. “My grandmother use to make that.”

  “What are the British making the next night?” Chang asked while checking a list. “Ok, not chicken. What is this Cordon Blue?”

  “You take a chicken breast, slice a pouch in it sideways,” she pantomimed with her hands. “Then you stuff the pocket with ham and cheese like Swiss or gruyere.”

  “That does sound good,” Chang smacked his lips.

  “Or,” I interjected, “we could make my father’s version, ‘Chicken Cordon Red White and Blue’.”

  “What?” Adams looked at me like I had grown two heads.

  “You slice the chicken the same way, but first you pound it kind of flat so it's thinner. Pan-fry the chicken. When it's almost done, put slices of crisp bacon and cheddar cheese in the pocket, then bake it."

  “Ohhh, that sounds delicious,” Adams almost moaned.

  “Even better, you can also stick toothpicks through to make it hold together, and deep-fry it,” I added with a grin.

  “Oooh,” Adams' eyelids fluttered. “Stop. You're gonna make me pass
out.”

  “Why,” Chang asked, “it is called red white and blue? I do not think there is anything red or blue in the ingredients?”

  Adams and I shared a wink. “Because,” I explained, “it’s got bacon, cheese and deep-frying. You can’t get much more American than that.”

  We made Chicken Cordon Red White & Blue for dinner, it was a big success. Except for one problem. Renee Giraud of the French team informed me that because I had committed such an egregious sacrilege against a staple of French culinary tradition, if we ever returned to Earth, America might be at war with France.

  I figured I would take that risk.

  I also noticed Giraud asked for a second helping at dinner.

  And Adams had to admit she liked poutine, although she wanted the fries to be crispy.

  “We’re ready, Sir,” I told Chotek over the intercom from my seat in the command chair. I didn’t want to be in the command chair, I wanted to be waiting inside a dropship with Captain Chandra’s SpecOps team. Major Smythe was sitting out this op; he would be directing the action from the ship while Chandra and Lt. Williams took their teams down to the moon’s surface to ransack the Elder site. It was obvious to everyone that remaining aboard the ship was just about killing Smythe, he understood the need for others to gain combat experience and he had full confidence in the two teams selected for the away mission. Being a career member of the Regiment, as Special Air Services people called their unit, he chafed at any inactivity. That morning, he had been so uncharacteristically brusque and short with people during breakfast, I almost ordered him to suit up and get aboard a ready bird.

  If Williams and Chandra were excited to lead their teams on an away mission, I am sure they were also at least a little bit jealous that Smythe had commanded the smash-and-grab mission at Barsoom, while their own operation at Bravo was not expected to encounter any opposition at all. Because the Bravo mission was planned to be quick and simple, I attempted to persuade Smythe that I should join the away teams, on the bullshit excuse that seeing the teams in action would give me a better appreciation of their capabilities. I would not be flying a dropship, and I would accompany the SpecOps teams as an armed observer and stay out of their way, but Smythe firmly shot me down. If there was unexpected opposition at Bravo, he declared, then the real action would be aboard the Dutchman and not down on the surface of the moon.

  Disappointed, I gave in, and I am ashamed to say I was immature and petty enough that I insisted on taking the Dutchman’s command chair myself, rather than letting someone else gain real-time command experience.

  “I will be right there, Colonel,” Chotek replied, and moments later, he stepped onto the bridge to stand behind my chair. He knew we had scanned the area and detected no threats, although we were so far from Bravo that the photons our sensors were picking up had left that planet three weeks ago. In my mind, that made the data tactically useless, but it made Chotek happy and his happiness made him easier to deal with. “Proceed when ready,” he announced in a calm, quiet tone, although I could see the fingertips gripping my chair were white with tension.

  A last glance at the main bridge display told me everything was green across the board. “Pilot, Jump Option Alpha. Engage.”

  The only visible changes were that a tiny orange dot of the star on the main display became a distinctly larger orange circle, and a blue-gray planet the apparent size of a ping pong ball now loomed in front of the ship. We had jumped in three lightminutes from Bravo, with the planet between us and the larger gas giant with the fueling station, so Bravo would block our gamma ray burst. I forced myself not to drum my fingers on the armrest of my chair as I waited for Skippy to give us the all-clear signal.

  “Hmm. Satellite is exactly where I expected it to be, Joe, no surprise there,” the beer can’s voice was laced with sarcasm. He also had wanted to jump directly in on top of the satellite and thought Chotek was being needlessly, even counterproductively cautious in insisting on an intermediate jump for recon. “Gosh, the planet and the moon are where they’re supposed to be too, who’d have guessed that?” His voice had taken on a nasty, dismissive tone that wasn’t helpful.

  “Skippy,” I started to ask him to stick to the facts, but he interrupted me.

  “That’s odd, let me check- Oh shit!” He shouted. “Jump! Jump Option Foxtrot!”

  The pilots knew they didn’t need to wait for my order to perform an emergency jump away. Jumping so soon after our previous jump meant the second jump had no measure of precision but it didn’t have to; it only needed to whisk us away from danger. From the immediate danger, that is. We had learned from painful experience that transitioning the ship from one place to another instantaneously was not always the magical escape solution I had hoped it was. On the main display, the star was again an orange dot, and no planet was visible.

  “What happened, Skippy?”

  “Give me a second, Joe, I’m devoting my full resources to calculating possible escape routes.”

  Possible? We had already successfully jumped away from the star system, but our escape was still only a possibility, not a certainty? I shared a shocked look with Chang, then wiped the anxiety off my face and looked back to Chotek to nod with reassurance I wasn’t feeling. And, oh crap, Hans freakin’ Chotek had been totally right to insist on a recon jump before we hit Bravo! He wasn’t ever going to let me forget that.

  “Ok, Joe, new jump options have been input to the autopilot. I’m not going to lie to you, we are in deep, deep trouble. We should jump again as soon as possible.”

  “Skippy, take a deep breath. What is the danger?”

  “A Thuranin task force. I detected ships from multiple battlegroups. Dozens of ships, at least, and those are just the ship signatures I was able to isolate before we jumped away.”

  “Detected? Those ships weren’t stealthed?” Again I shared a look with Lt. Colonel Chang, this time with less anxiety. A task force conducting routine exercises would be at least partly unstealthed, and if we had stumbled across those ships, it would be a while before they reacted to our presence.

  “Those ships were stealthed, Joe,” Skippy crushed my hopes. “What I detected was direct gamma ray burst signatures from eight ships that had recently jumped into the system. By carefully interpreting the sensor data, I was able to detect multiple other gamma ray bursts, based on altered chemistry in the upper atmosphere of the planet. And from the direct burst data, I can tell there are stealthed ships out there; the gamma ray signatures have tiny resonance voids, where the photons were bent around a stealthed ship. There are a lot of ships out there, Joe.”

  “Stealthed ships can get detected by gamma rays washing over them?” I asked, completely ignoring what was truly important at that moment.

  “They can be detected by me. It is an extremely subtle effect that is difficult to detect with this ship’s crappy sensors, and the Thuranin do not even know what to look for. That trick only works part of the time, so the fact that I detected multiple stealthed ships tells me there must be a lot more of them out there. You’re missing the point as usual, Joe. A whole freakin’ task force was waiting there to ambush us. If we had taken a couple more days to get there, all the enemy ships would have arrived and their gamma ray bursts would have passed out of our detection range. We got lucky.”

  “Whoa. Wait a minute, Skippy,” I had one eye on the bar at the bottom of the main display screen, it showed we still had another twenty six minutes until the capacitors had recharged enough for a medium-distance jump. In our jump drive’s sad condition, a medium-distance effort did not take us nearly as far as the Flying Dutchman used to travel in her prime. “Ok, there is a Thuranin task force here, and that sucks for us, but what makes you think they were waiting for us? How the hell could they know we were coming?”

  “I do not know how the Thuranin could know where we were going,” Skippy’s tone was clipped and short, reflecting his great frustration. “I know this is an ambush because I detected powerful, overlapping
damping fields around the target planet. If we had jumped in, we would be trapped, no question about it. The Thuranin not only knew we were coming to this star system, they knew exactly where we planned to go. We did have a bit of luck; the Thuranin are so eager to assure we couldn’t jump away, they assigned too many ships to project a damping field wide around the planet. The damping effect is so strong, it distorted the planet’s magnetic field. That is the anomaly I noticed first; once I saw that, I started looking for gamma ray echoes and stealthed ships.”

  “Holy shi-” I looked back at Chotek guiltily, as if I had been caught saying a bad word in church and my father was about to reprimand me. “They knew were coming? Ok, ok, ok,” I waved my slightly shaky hands. “Let’s put that aside for now. What do we do next?”

  “Unfortunately, we do not have infinite options. There are only three wormholes within the sphere we can reach.”

  “There are more than three wormholes on the chart, Skippy,” I jabbed a finger at the main display. “All we care about is escaping that task force, we can worry about where the wormhole goes later.”

  “There are plenty of wormholes in this general area, Joe, but only three we can reach before our jump drive burns out. With a task force pursuing us, we will be jumping often, without enough time to properly calibrate the coils between jumps. The Thuranin know we will be headed for one of the three closest wormholes, so we will be in a race to get there first.”

  “A race?” I felt a spark of optimism. “We have a star carrier, and we’re not trapped in a damping field this time.”

  “We had a star carrier. Then a bunch of monkeys stole it, took it for a joyride to get bananas, stripped it of everything useful and left it up on blocks behind a dumpster in a bad part of town. Joe, our jump drive is in horrible condition. We can’t outrun a real star carrier; we can’t even outrun a Thuranin cruiser or one of their heavy destroyers. I know Thuranin fleet tactics, they will use their star carriers to leapfrog squadrons of destroyers and cruisers ahead of us, supported by picket lines of sensor frigates parked across our likely path.”