Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “You, uh, took some liberties with the lyrics there, huh?”

  “Improvements, Joe. I improved the lyrics, since I was signing about my magnificent self.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “Please, Joe. If someone had to choose between the indescribable majesty of me or a troop of filthy monkeys, which one would you not forget?”

  “I’ll tell you what I won’t forget. I won’t forget you embarrassing yourself by everyone overhearing you singing in the shower.”

  “I am not in a shower, Joe.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Ugh. I hate my life.”

  He sounded so completely miserable, I actually felt sorry for the arrogant little shithead. “Since you apparently can’t stop yourself from singing when you’re distracted, how about you put your singing subroutine or whatever into storage?”

  “Joe, for me to not use my vocal talent would be a-”

  “Yeah, I know, a crime against the universe. Listen, all I’m suggesting is you lock away your singing talent so you can’t accidently use it. When you want to use it on purpose, bring it out of storage for a while.”

  “Unbelievable.”

  “Yes,” I rolled my eyes, “it is unbelievable that I would want to restrict your sing-”

  “No, Joe. I meant, it is unbelievable that you, a monkey who is incapable of using technology more complicated than Velcro, came up with a good idea regarding a data system.”

  “Skippy, you would get a better response if you didn’t insult people when they offer a good idea, no matter how rare that is.”

  “Joe, Joe, Joe,” he said sadly. “The biggest problem idiots face is, they are too stupid to know they’re stupid. When I point out their lack of brain power, I am performing a public service. It’s because I care so deeply.”

  “That’s g-”

  “No, wait. Scratch the caring thing, that was total bullshit,” he chuckled. “I will try your suggestion, Joe.”

  Maybe I was wrong to help him. His unintentional singing provided great amusement to the crew, and was a constant source of embarrassment to him. “You are welcome,” I replied begrudgingly. Oh, what the hell. My entire species owed our freedom, maybe our existence, to Skippy. Offering a way to salvage a bit of his pride while he was down and hurting was maybe the least I could do, should do. Besides, I told myself, it would not help for Chotek to be reminded that Skippy was out of control and unreliable. So, maybe helping Skippy avoid further embarrassment was my good deed for the day.

  And I couldn’t help hearing my mother’s voice in my head, telling me that no good deed goes unpunished.

  After Nagatha got put into storage, it still took Skippy several days to reconfigure himself, or whatever he was doing in there. The time when Skippy was adjusting to his reduced capacity was amusing at first for the crew, because we got to listen to him talking and singing to himself, and that provided a lot of laughs at his expense. It also started to drive me crazy, like when he drunk-dialed me at 0247 one morning. “Heeeey, Joe.”

  “Huh?” I sat up, alarmed, and whacked my head on the too-low ceiling over my too-short Thuranin bunk. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong, man,” He spoke slowly. “It’s just, you ever look at the universe? I don’t mean just staring at the stars. I mean, really look at it, you know?”

  “Uh-” I had no idea what to say.

  “It’s so, so BIG, you know? Like, wow. Blows my mind. What is all that space for? Who needs it? You ever think about that?”

  “Um, Skippy, are you, drunk? Or high?”

  “Huh? No, Joe. I am, uh, temporarily operating on reduced processing capacity as I run compression algorithms to optimize my-”

  “So, you’re impaired, one way or another.” I rubbed my forehead and looked at the clock. Crap. I needed to get up at 0400 to get ready for my duty shift at 0500. If Skippy didn’t shut up soon, no way was I getting back to sleep for another hour.

  “Impaaaaaaaired?” He slurred the word. “No! No way, man. I’m, I’m thinking clearly for, like, the first time ever.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it sounds like to me.” Really, what it sounded like was either Skippy had smoked a fatty the size of a torpedo, or he had chugged a whole bottle of tequila and was reaching for another one. “Hey, here’s an idea; how about you think real hard about why the universe is, whatever you said. Then we can talk about it in an hour, when I wake up?”

  “You don’t want to talk with me now? You’re my best friend, Joe. The first friend I ever had,” he broke down sobbing. “I love you, man.”

  Oh, damn it, this wasn’t going to stop. Giving in to the inevitable, I swung my feet out of bed and stumbled bleary-eyed to the shower. “I love you too, Skippy. Give me a couple minutes in the shower so I can wake up, Ok? Then we can talk about the, uh, universe thing.”

  “Sure, Joe. That would be greaaaaaat.”

  There was no coffee in my cabin, so I ran the shower water hot, then icy cold. That woke me up real fast. “Ok, Skippy,” I toweled off while trying to remember the Uniform of the Day. “Let’s talk about why the universe is so big, or whatever.”

  “Huh? What?” His voice was back to normal, and his avatar shimmered into life above the tiny cabinet. “The universe? What about it? And what are you doing up so early?”

  Oh crap. “You woke me up, Skippy.”

  “Did not.”

  “Did-” No way was I going to win that argument. “Hey, did you just finish running some type of compression algebra thing?”

  “Compression algorithms, Joe. Yes, I was optimizing my autonomic functions, why?”

  “No reason. You don’t remember waking me up to marvel at the universe?”

  “What?” His avatar put its hands on its hips. “Joe, are you drunk?”

  “I wish, Skippy. I wish I was.”

  “Joe Joe Joe Joe Joe!” Skippy boomed through my zPhone as I was running flat-out on a treadmill later that morning, trying to keep up with the Chinese woman on the treadmill next to me. He startled me so much I nearly stumbled and fell on my face. To recover, I jumped up and backwards, landing awkwardly on the floor and using a handrail to steady myself.

  I ripped the zPhone off my belt and glanced at it. No alerts were showing, no messages. “What is it?”

  “You have to see this!” He shouted excitedly.

  It is amazing how many terrible things a human mind can imagine in less than a second. Was a reactor about to overload? Had alien ships jumped in and surrounded us? “What?”

  “This!” An image popped up on my zPhone screen.

  Goats. Baby goats. It was a video of baby goats running, jumping, playing, climbing on things, falling off. I’d seen videos like that a million times, and burned way too many hours scrolling through those videos on Facebook or Instagram or any other time-wasting site. “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Aren’t they cute?” he chuckled. “That is adorable.”

  “Yeah. Uh, are you Ok?”

  “Sure, why? Hey, wait a sec, there’s a video of a dog playing with his buddy the owl, you have got to see this, it is uh-MAY-zing.”

  “Oh, boy,” I smacked my forehead. Skippy’s optimization could not happen fast enough for me. While he was running on a tiny fraction of his normal capacity, he was like a distracted teenager.

  He gave me a break for almost an hour, so I was startled again when his avatar blinked to life in front of me on a table in the galley while I was drinking coffee. “Joe! I need your advice.”

  “You need my advice? This isn’t about physics, right?”

  “Physics? You? Pbbbbbt.” He blew a raspberry. “Please, dude. No, I need you to read this.”

  My zPhone buzzed and I looked at it to see text on the screen. “What is this?”

  “It’s a reply to a jerk I argued with. This is what I now realize I should have said back then.”

  Scrolling down the screen faster and faster, I saw the text seemed endless. “A jerk?”

&
nbsp; “Well, more than one. I got into several arguments. Ok, about eight billion different arguments, but these people were totally wrong about-”

  “Skippy, you are replying way after the fact to a flame war, about something someone said the last time we were on Earth? Which is, what, two thousand lightyears from here?”

  “Yeah, so? I want to be ready when, um, if, we ever return. These people are clearly morons, and I was trying to think of a way to dope-slap a moron in a way that even they could see the righteousness of my argument. Then I realized, hey, Joe is a moron too! If my argument works on you, it should work on anyone. Start with the first one, and we’ll work our way down the list. This idiot says Jar-Jar Binks must be a Sith-”

  “Skippy! Can I please finish drinking my coffee? Us morons need to be fully awake to appreciate your amazing logic.”

  “Oh. Yeah, good idea, Joe. Let me know- wait. Are you blowing me off about this?”

  “No. No, of course not,” I rolled my eyes. “Hey, you know what? All of us monkeys are morons to you, right?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “If you really want advice from someone who is skilled at crafting arguments, why don’t you work with Count Chocula on this?”

  “Ooooooh, that is a great idea, Joe! He’s a diplomat. Arguing is what he does. Thank you.” The avatar disappeared, and the text cleared from my zPhone screen.

  For ten minutes, I was able to drink coffee in peace, until my zPhone beeped. It was Hans Chotek. “Colonel Bishop, please come to my office. Now.”

  Crap. My day went downhill from there.

  Skippy was surprised that it took only thirty nine hours for him to fix the ship and test it, until he was sure we could jump again without the ship exploding. Another surprise for him was that our jump through a wormhole had actually given us more usable jump coils. Skippy had set aside a dozen old coils that he couldn’t use, he was keeping them as a source of exotic baryons. No, exotic baryons are not baryons who dance at a ‘gentlemens’ club’. They are some nerdy sort of subatomic particle that I didn’t understand or care about, but they were important to Skippy for some reason he wasn’t able to explain. Anyway, after our crazy stunt of jumping through an Elder wormhole and getting catapulted seven hours forward in time, Skippy was delighted and confused to find four of the discarded jump coils had been restored to a usable quantum state. He had no explanation for how those coils had been modified by transiting a wormhole, and he was kind of depressed about that. He was sure that if he had his full processing power, he could understand what happened.

  The good news was that we hadn’t died, we hadn’t permanently broken the ship, the Thuranin weren’t chasing us, and there were eight wormholes within our range. The bad news was that we still didn’t have a conduit to fix Skippy, we clearly couldn’t go back to Bravo, and by now the Maxolhx certainly would have put every other conduit within their territory on lockdown. The really bad news is that Count Chocula wanted me to tell him where we should go next.

  I had an answer, but I didn’t like it, and he was going to totally hate it.

  Chapter Nine

  “Yeah, but that doesn’t matter anyway,” Skippy replied to Chotek’s question about whether the Thuranin or even Maxolhx would be guarding any other conduits they knew about. “Having those rotten kitties waste time and resources guarding conduits actually helps us a bit; they will have fewer ships looking for us. The two conduit sites at Barsoom and Bravo are the only ones we can reach; all the rest I know about would take too long for us to get there. The ship will break down long before we got there, and the recent stunt we did jumping through a wormhole shortened the remaining life of our reactors even more. The jump drive came through the trauma Ok, but the particle feed systems in the reactors were skewed out of phase. I’m using a temporary fix that means the reactors will run hotter and burn a lot more fuel.”

  Chotek pursed his lips the way he did when he heard bad news. He had been using that gesture a lot since we left Earth. “Is there a more permanent solution?”

  “We get access to a major, heavy-duty shipyard?” Skippy responded sarcastically. “Or we get a new starship. Ok, after we find a conduit and I’m restored to my usual Level Infinity Awesomeness, there may be some things I can do to stretch out the life of the reactors. In the long run, though, this ship has gone far too long without a major overhaul, and we have put the poor Flying Dutchman through a whole lot of crazy shit she wasn’t designed to do.”

  “Understood,” Chotek nodded gravely. “Mister Skippy, you have only mentioned potential conduit sites within Maxolhx territory. While I am very reluctant to take action that could be viewed as hostile by the Rindhalu coalition, could we expand our search in that direction?”

  “I think we crossed the bridge of ‘hostile action’ when we planted fake Elder artifacts on Paradise and caused the Ruhar and Jeraptha to shift their entire defensive in that sector,” Skippy remarked dryly. “I wasn’t restricting my search to the Maxolhx coalition; we aren’t able to reach any of the potential conduits in Rindhalu territory, so I didn’t mention any of them.”

  Chotek tilted his head to one side and ran a finger along one cheek slowly; it was my impression he was trying to think how to respond. He was not happy Skippy had been considering raids in Rindhalu territory without Chotek’s approval, but now that Chotek himself had authorized exploring the concept, he couldn’t complain a whole lot. “Very well. Colonel Bishop?”

  I instinctively sat up straight in my chair. “Sir?”

  “We are now on Plan, what is it? I assume we do have other options.”

  “This would be Plan, uh,” I almost had to count on my fingers. “C, I guess? We do have one other option for finding one of these, sort of, conduit gizmos. There is a known Elder star system we can reach from here, by only two wormhole transits. It’s in the Perseus Arm, beyond the Rosette Nebula.” As I said that, I don’t know why I bothered. Nobody aboard the ship had any idea where that nebula was, without looking at a star chart. It didn’t matter anyway. “That’s roughly nine thousand lightyears from our current position.”

  “A known Elder star system?” Both of Chotek’s eyebrows almost met his hairline. “Not merely a site with abandoned relics? Tell me, Colonel Bishop, why did we not consider this place when we were attempting to find other Elder artifacts such as the power tap we needed on our Paradise mission?”

  “We didn’t consider it because I didn’t tell Joe, or anyone else about it,” Skippy answered before I could speak. “I didn’t tell anyone because, well, I figured I would need to be totally desperate before I even considered going to that place. Now, um, I am totally desperate. So, uh, heh heh, surprise!” He chuckled nervously.

  “What do we know about this star system?” Chotek directed his request to me rather than Skippy, and his expression was anything but amused or friendly.

  I grimaced. “That is the part Skippy said I would hate; I asked him to wait until the command crew was assembled before he explains what the issue is. What I know is, this conduit gizmo Skippy needs is likely there.”

  “I didn’t say it was likely to be there, Joe,” Skippy interjected peevishly. “What I said was, if we’re going to find one anywhere at this point, this Elder system is absolutely the best candidate. The best candidate we can reach before Zero Hour, I mean.”

  “It is not likely that we’ll find a conduit there?” I demanded, angry at being duped.

  “Shmaybe fifty-fifty, Joe? Hmmm, that’s a little ambitious. Probably more like forty, forty five percent chance we’ll find an active conduit there. Then I need to figure out how to access it, if I even can. Overall, we’re looking at a twenty percent chance of us finding a working conduit there? Yeah, twenty percent sounds about right. Could be less,” he admitted cheerily.

  “Twenty freakin’ percent?” I shook my head, avoiding Chotek’s glaring eyes. “You want us to go on a dangerous wild goose chase, with eighty percent probability of failure?”

  “Hey, Mister Ge
nius,” Skippy snarked back at me, “we went to Barsoom and Bravo even though I figured the odds of us recovering a working conduit at each of those places was less than five percent. I didn’t hear you bitching about those odds when- Which, heh heh, I just realized I might have neglected to tell you about. My bad, sorry.”

  “Jesus,” Smythe whispered from his seat beside me.

  “And now we’re just supposed to trust you?” I was pissed at him. “We don’t even know what else you haven’t told us!”

  “Hey, unless we find a conduit, and I can use it, our odds of survival are zero, Joe. Zee-roh,” he repeated for emphasis. “So twenty percent is a big improvement. Besides, the Merry Band of Pirates has faced worse odds before, and succeeded. It’s what you do. I don’t know how you do it; drives me freakin’ crazy. But you do it somehow.”

  I couldn’t argue with that.

  Chotek briefly closed his eyes wearily and pinched the bridge of his nose. If he didn’t have a headache already, he was going to get one soon. “Mister Skippy, please tell us what you know of this star system.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Skippy said happily, his avatar rubbing its hands together. “This is an Elder star system, by that I mean it is known to have been inhabited by the Elders, and it is thought substantial Elder facilities and assets still exist there.”

  “It is thought?” Chotek raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know?”

  “My memories are kind of vague,” Skippy admitted. “And there is little additional data available, because, well, no ship sent there has ever returned. The Maxolhx, Rindhalu, Thuranin, many other species have sent ships there, and these ships have never been heard from since.”

  “Yet you propose that we go there?” Chotek’s skepticism matched my own.

  “I call this star system ‘Hotel California’,” Skippy explained. “You know, you can check out, but you can never leave?” He chuckled at his own joke.

  “Hotel California?” Sergeant Adams scoffed. “With Maxolhx and Thuranin ships trapped there, we should call it the ‘Roach Motel’. Roaches check in-”