Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “Like?”

  “I was hoping you would try to guess,” he sounded disappointed. “Then I would have the joy of mocking you unmercifully.”

  “Not without coffee, Skippy.”

  “Ugh, fine. Look at your phone. The first chart shows the timeline of impacts. The second chart I am now overlaying shows the known expeditions to the Roach Motel.”

  “Holy shit,” I gasped. Most of the dots representing times when ships were sent on one-way trips into the Roach Motel, did not have matching dots on the timeline of impact craters on Gingerbread. But almost all of the impact craters matched up with known times ships were sent in. “The events that don’t match up are-”

  “Very likely expeditions I do not know about, yes,” he finished the thought for me.

  “Good, good. Uh, so these impact craters, they can’t be from debris when the Guardians destroyed trespassing ships, right?”

  “No. The Guardians do not use kinetic weapons.”

  “Then what caused the craters? Why are there craters sometimes and not others?”

  “Do you want to guess?” He asked eagerly.

  “Again, not without coffee.”

  “You are such a party pooper, Joe. Ok, fine,” he said ‘fine’ the way women do when things are anything but fine. “I believe the impact craters are from the Guardians wiping out groups of survivors on Gingerbread.”

  “Crap!” Now I was awake, without needing coffee. “They’re not doing that to us?”

  “No, Joe, they will not harm us, I am still able to keep them quiet. Although that is growing more difficult by the day.”

  “Great. Hey, if the Guardians nuke people who manage to land on Gingerbread, then why haven’t they hit that pain in the ass group of Thuranin?”

  “My theory is the Guardians only react when a group of survivors uses a technology the Guardians views as a potential threat. Like generating power over a certain limit. Or flying above a certain altitude. Or using weapons. That is why those Thuranin were so bad at shooting, Joe, I don’t think they had actually fired a weapon since they landed. Somehow they must have figured out they can only use a minimum level of technology, or the Guardians will pound them to dust.”

  “Whew,” I whistled as I looked at the chart on my zPhone. “That’s,” I counted, “fourteen. Fourteen different impact events over the past million years. Wow. Fourteen groups of survivors managed to land on Gingerbread.”

  “Sixteen, counting us and the last group of Thuranin, Joe. And that doesn’t count groups who landed but could not survive here. If a group of survivors did not have the ability to grow their own food, they would not have lasted long.”

  “Good point.” That reminded me that Chotek had been pressing for recon flights to concentrate on looking for sites to build a permanent settlement, rather than continuing the fruitless task of searching for Skippy’s elusive conduit thing. “Back to the conduit. Where is it?”

  My zPhone display changed from a chart to a map. “Thirty eight hundred kilometers from here, Joe. Underground, there is a series of natural caverns and more importantly, extensive artificial tunnels. From the type of installation that used to be on the surface, I know there is a conduit under the ground. Or, there was one.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Yes. There used to be a large complex on the surface; based on its configuration I can tell it facilitated linking conduits. There must have been a conduit under the surface, probably several conduits.”

  “Must have been? Used to be? You don’t know?”

  “I can’t see the damned thing, Joe,” his frustration was evident. “What I can tell you is that, if there is a conduit on Gingerbread, this is where we’ll find it. Or we won’t. It’s that simple.”

  “Got it. We’re going, then. You will come with us?”

  “Absolutely,” his cheeriness was back. “The last thing we want is a bunch of monkeys poking around in scary dark places without me.”

  “Uh huh. Because the last time you went poking around in a scary dark place, it worked out great for everyone.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Colonel Bishop?” Called a voice from behind me.

  “Captain Giraud?” I asked, surprised.

  “Skippy told me you wanted coffee? Sir?” His expression made it clear he did not appreciate being requested to fetch coffee.

  “No. Skippy wants me to drink coffee. Oh, crap, Captain, I’m sorry.”

  “Now that I am here,” he said with a Gallic shrug, holding up two mugs of coffee.

  “Oh, sure,” I patted the rock. “Sit down. How are you?” I knew Giraud and the entire French team had finally been declared ready to return to duty, having fully recovered from radiation poisoning when the Flying Dutchman jumped away to ambush a Thuranin starship near our captured relay station.

  “I am well,” he replied brusquely, not seeking chit chat in the wee small hours of the morning. And he did not want any more inquiries into his health, he had gotten thoroughly tired of people treating him like an invalid. “Did I hear you say Skippy found a conduit?”

  Chapter Twenty

  Hans Chotek was not thrilled about the idea of us devoting scarce resources to another likely futile search for a magical device to fix Skippy, and he limited me to taking two dropships away from base camp. I protested more out of habit; another dropship or two would not make any difference to whether our search was successful or not. Anyway, we flew to the site, there were ruins extending in a circle for half a kilometer. The ruins had been there a long, long time; long enough to be mostly buried, and it looked like the Elders had stripped away everything useful. Despite Skippy’s protests about it being a waste of time, we could not resist poking around those ruins that were still above ground. He was right, it was a waste of time, except I got to touch Elder constructions with my bare hands, without the barrier of spacesuit gloves. Running my fingers along some sort of super hard concrete that used to hold up some sort of device, I felt a connection to the mysterious Elders who had built the place. Skippy ruined my momentary bliss by stating the site had certainly been constructed by bots, that maybe no Elder had ever visited the site, and could we please move our asses?

  The entrance to the tunnel, where Skippy thought we would, or might, find a conduit, had collapsed long ago. It took careful use of explosives, then people using mech suits to clear a hole to the actual tunnel. When it was safe, I walked down to the tunnel and stuck my head in the narrow access hole. We would need to enlarge it. “Whoa,” I pulled my head back and switched off my helmet lights to avoid blinding people. “It’s like the Dark Ages in there.”

  “What?” Skippy asked in disbelief.

  “The Dark Ages, Skippy. People stumbled around,” I pantomimed walking with my hands in front of me, “bumping into stuff because they couldn’t see.”

  “Oh. My. God,” he gasped. “You are so freakin’ ignorant. You think the Dark Ages are called that because, what, your sun went to sleep?”

  “I’m not a scientist, Skippy, but it was dark for some reason. That’s why they were called ‘Dark’, duh.”

  “Joe, I, I am speechless. I, I have no words.”

  I winked at Adams, and she exploded with laughter, bringing the rest of us with her. “Don’t be so gullible, Skippy,” I said when I could talk again.

  “Aargh,” Skippy made a sound like gnashing his teeth. “Joe, I hate you more than words can say.”

  “I love you too, Skippy.” Turning to Smythe, I advised “We’re going to need extra lights, and extra powerpacks for helmets and portable lights. Skippy, is there any way you can activate lights in there?”

  “I should not respond because I am mad at you, Joe, but I’ll do what I can. There are lights in the tunnels, however they are truly ancient and have not been used in millions of years.”

  “Yeah, but it’s Elder technology, right? It should last forever.”

  “Joe, even the Elders didn’t last forever, remember? They left. Those tunnels were
intended for temporary use during construction of the underground facility, so I suspect the Elders did not expend a lot of effort on making the lights in there durable.”

  He was right, the original tunnel lights were long dead and useless. Our helmet lights and handheld flashlights provided plenty of illumination. Smythe and Giraud went ahead with the scouts. We needed scouts, because Skippy did not have a complete map of the tunnels and we had a lot of false starts and hit many dead ends. In some places the tunnels had partly collapsed, although there were remarkably few of those considering how old the tunnels were; around a hundred million years according to Skippy. He told us not to worry about the places where the tunnels had fallen in; he expected the Elders would have dug multiple access points to whatever chamber the conduit was in. If there was such a chamber. If there ever was a conduit deep under the surface.

  I did not like having thousands of gallons of water over my head, no way could I have ever been in the silent service on a submarine. I like even less the idea of having millions of tons of rock over my head. Wearing an armored suit sealed up was claustrophobic enough for me, I was not pleased to think of being in a dark tunnel that could collapse at any moment.

  My earpiece buzzed, then the voice of Giraud spoke. “Sir, you should get up here and see this.”

  With my escorts Sergeant Adams and Lt. Poole, and with Skippy attached to my waist, I jogged forward down the gently sloping tunnel.

  The tunnel ended in a large, solid-looking door, but that was not what the team was staring at. Off to the right side, near the tunnel wall, was an object. A vaguely familiar object. A vaguely sinister object.

  It was a monolith.

  A big, utterly black rectangular slab of some shiny hard substance, set in the floor. “Whoa,” I said quietly, while we all looked at each other nervously.

  “Da. Da. Da! DA-DA!” Skippy sang tunelessly.

  “Not funny, Skippy.”

  “Come on, Joe,” he chuckled. “That’s the theme song from “2001: A Space Odyssey”. I had to do that.”

  “No you didn’t. Not now while we’re in these spooky tunnels. What the hell is this thing anyway?” The monolith, or whatever it truly was, did not look exactly like the thing in the movie. This one had rounded edges, and now that I examined it closely, its surface was not completely smooth, being covered in a grid of tiny hexagons. It was utterly deep black.

  “I’ll tell you what it is not,” Skippy scoffed. “It is not an alien device that miraculously grants intelligence to ignorant monkeys. Because that is impossible. Intelligent monkeys, hee hee, that’s funny.”

  “I’m glad we’re keeping you amused. Is this thing dangerous?” Breaking military protocol, I stuffed my hands in my pockets, fighting an urge to reach out and touch the thing. Based on my fuzzy memory of seeing that movie on late-night cable, doing that hadn’t worked out too well for the astronauts in 2001.

  “No, Joe. It is a field generator, and it is powered down. Has been for a very, very long time. Its purpose is to stabilize the tunnels in case of quakes. So, it is here to protect you, although of course that is not by design.”

  “Great. I’ll take your word about it,” I said quietly as I slid past the monolith, keeping to the other side of the tunnel. “Open the door for us, Skippy.”

  Skippy’s voice changed, becoming soft and monotone. “I can’t do that, Dave. You’re endangering the mission.”

  “Skippy!”

  “Hahahahahaha! Oh, that was precious!”

  “No, that was scary,” I was pissed at him. “An AI should never do that joke.”

  “An AI has to do that joke sometime, Joe. Damn, I’ve been saving that one since we met on Paradise! I finally got the perfect opportunity. Ok, opening the door now. I should warn you, there are more of those monolith things spaced evenly throughout the tunnels.”

  “A lot of them?” Even now that I knew what it was, the ominous black slab made me uncomfortable.

  “Nah, you’ll probably see only one or two more. But you had a hissy fit about this one, so I thought you could use a heads up.”

  I was so thrown off balance by seeing the monolith, I didn’t bother to protest that my reaction had not been a ‘hissy fit’.

  After the shock of seeing a monolith, Smythe pressed forward at a determined but not hurried pace, eager to attain the objective. Twenty minutes later, the scout team called me again, so I trotted ahead to see in person what the problem was. My visor and zPhone already gave me a view from the helmet cameras of the forward scouts; I still wanted to see it up close.

  It was a hole in the floor, a big one. Maybe five meters across, perfectly circular, and there was another circle in the ceiling above. First, I looked down, where placid black water filled the hole ten meters below the floor of the tunnel. “Crap. It is flooded,” I stated the obvious. Then I leaned out over the hole a bit to crane my head upward, switching on my helmet lights. The hole above was lost in darkness, too far away for me to see how high it went. I could see that, although the wall of the hole was mostly smooth, there were cracks, and places where chunks had fallen away over the eons.

  “Careful there, Sir,” Ranger Poole cautioned with a grip on my backpack. “We wouldn’t want you to fall in.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, pulling myself back to safety, and gazing down at the water. “I’ve had enough underwater excursions for this mission. Maybe my entire life. This does remind me, did you hear about the guy who worked at the brewery?”

  Poole’s expression was blank. “Sir?”

  I grinned. “His wife is at home, getting dinner ready, and a minister and the supervisor of the brewery knock on her door. I’m sorry, Ma’am, the supervisor says, your husband fell in a beer vat this morning and drowned. The wife looks back at the kitchen where the table is set for dinner. He fell in this morning, she asks, and you are only telling me now? Well, the supervisor says, it took a while because he got out a couple times to use the bathroom.”

  Poole exploded with laughter, mostly because she hadn’t expected me to tell a joke, and everyone joined in.

  “Skippy, what is this hole for?” I asked.

  “It was an antigravity access tube for bringing equipment down from the surface, way back when the facility was being constructed.”

  “Well, damn it,” I peered upward again, where the hole seemed to go a long, long way up. “Could we have used this tube to get down here, instead of walking the whole freakin’ way?”

  “No, Joe. These tubes have been abandoned for a very long time, and they have become somewhat unstable. That particular tube is blocked fifty two meters above you.”

  “Only fifty two?” I squinted, then smartened up and eyeclicked through a menu to increase magnification of my helmet visor. “I don’t see anything.”

  “That’s because of the fuzz field, dumdum. It is more powerful down underground.”

  “Oh,” I felt foolish. “You said ‘this particular’ tube. There are more of them?”

  “Yes, although not many in that region. Your planned route should cross only three more. Keep in mind, my picture of the underground layout is incomplete due to the fuzz field.”

  “Got it. Ok, everyone, be careful of giant holes in the floor. They will only be at places where the tunnel gets really wide?”

  “Correct,” Skippy answered simply.

  “Good safety tip. Let’s move out.”

  The tunnel slated down more steeply and curved to the left. After one revolution, we realized the tunnel had become a spiral. Constantly turning to the left made me feel like a NASCAR driver. There were tunnels off to the right now and then; Skippy excitedly told us to ignore them. He was now confident there was some sort of chamber below us, and he wanted to get there quickly. I had to restrain Smythe from jogging down the spiral too fast. “It’s taken us this long to find a conduit, Major. A couple minutes for caution aren’t going to hurt.”

  “Yes, Colonel,” Smythe replied.

  The beer can was less cooperativ
e. “A couple minutes in meatsack time Joe! A freakin’ eternity in Skippy time.”

  Despite the beer can’s bitching, we reached the bottom less than half an hour later.

  “Got it!” Skippy shouted as I came through the tunnel doorway into a spherical chamber so large, our helmet floodlights only dimly illuminated the gloom of the far side. From the doorway, a walkway perhaps five meters wide extended way out into the center of the chamber. “Whoo! Yes! There is a conduit here. Let’s go get it, Joe, we’re not getting any younger.”

  “Uh, wait a minute there, Skippy,” I warily shuffled my feet to the edge of the walkway, which did not have a railing. Or any visible means of support. It cantilevered out from the bottom of the doorway, a long, thin, flimsy-looking, vertigo-inducing bridge to nowhere. Literally nowhere. The bridge simply ended, as if it had bene snapped off. The wall of the chamber was smooth, looking down I could barely see the bottom. To see better, I eyeclicked to zoom in the image. The bottom of the chamber was not entirely smooth, there was some sort of machinery down there. Or, what I was seeing was stuff that had broken away and fallen over the eons. Stuff like the rest of the walkway and its supports. “Where is this conduit thing?”

  “Up there, duh.”

  “Up wh- oh,” I tilted my head back. Something sort of like a chandelier hung down from the top of the chamber. In the magnified view of my visor, I could see things up there had broken away. Or had been removed? There were brackets which clearly used to hold something, but now projected out into empty air. Wires and cables hung down, connected to nothing. Now that I knew what I was looking at, the edge of the walkway toward the other end was scuffed and chipped, as if items falling off the chandelier had impacted the walkway on their way down. “Up there? How the hell are we supposed to get up there?”

  “You’re the monkeys, that’s your problem. I’m the big picture guy, Joe, you handle the details.”