Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “You’re a gunnery sergeant now, consider it a field promotion. Hell knows you’ve earned it, and we’ve been away from Earth long enough. Even if you’d stayed on Paradise, you would have enough time in grade by now.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” she turned her attention back to the hinge and activated the torch again. I took that to mean she didn’t know what else to say.

  “Hell, you know this outfit,” I forced a laugh, “they’ll promote anybody.”

  “I heard that,” she replied, but I could hear the mirth in her voice.

  When she had cut three quarters of the way through the hinge, I had a bad thought. “Skippy, when that hinge is cut through, what happens next?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, Joe. The hinge is on the outside, so the door is designed to swing outward. The water pressure down here is keeping the door closed, even without the hinge. That makes sense.”

  “Ok, so how do we get it open?” The door was thick and massive, no way could even our powered suits pull it away from its frame.

  “Now here is where I recommend explosives.”

  “I like that idea,” Adams agreed.

  “Gunny,” I used her new rank, “setting off explosives in the water will crush us.” Just then, I had another bad thought. “Hey, uh, Skippy, what happens to us when it does open?”

  “A massive surge of water will blow through the gap, carrying you with it and crushing you. Duh.”

  “That is not optimal,” Adams observed needlessly.

  “Relax, monkeys, the beer can has a plan.”

  “This is a good plan, Skippy,” I offered praise as we hung suspended halfway out of the water, near where the shaft met the horizontal tunnel.

  “Of course it is a good plan, Joe, it is my plan,” the beer can said smugly.

  “Yeah, except, what do we do if those explosives don’t get that door open?”

  “Uh-”

  “Then we’ll have to go back down there to plant more charges, and if the door cuts loose while we’re working on it-”

  “Adios muchachos?” Skippy finished my thought.

  “Chill, Colonel,” Adams ordered. “When it comes to things that go ‘Boom’, I know what I’m doing. Fire in the hole!” She shouted as she eyeclicked to set off the charges.

  There was bark of muffled thunder, then bubbles erupted around us. Then the water level began to drop. “Here we go,” I announced as I let out line to descend as the water level fell.

  The tunnel floor trembled under Smythe’s boots. If he hadn’t felt the tremor through the soles of his feet, the alert flashing in his visor would have notified him. “What is that?”

  Captain Giraud, standing to Smythe’s left and retreating slowly as the tunnel-filling bot haltingly advanced, checked his own sensor data. “Tremor. I hope it is not caused by a bot even larger than this one.” The Elder bot had been inexorably moving down the tunnel toward them, its limbs grinding and screeching. With its bulk almost completely filling the tunnel, there was no way to get around it, unless they used explosives. Smythe and Giraud had hurriedly developed a plan for the team to retreat into the chamber below. If the bot kept moving onto the walkway bridge, the team could use anchored lines under the bridge to get past and behind the bot, and sprint up the spiral tunnel. If the bot halted at the entrance to the chamber, then the pirates would need to take measures Skippy had warned them against, such as disabling the bot with rifle rounds and blowing it apart with explosives.

  “If that tremor was caused by a bot, we are in-”

  “Major Smythe!” A call came from Mychalchyk on the scout team, far behind Smythe. Although their first trip down to the spherical chamber at the end of the spiral tunnel had not revealed any side tunnels, Smythe had sent people ahead to see if any other way out could be found. “We’ve got flooding! There’s water pouring in down-” the voice cut off, then returned. “Sir, we’re underwater down here,” said the voice under strain. In the background, Smythe could hear the sound of the Ranger’s helmet being bumped and scraped against the tunnel wall. Or ceiling. “The water is coming in fast, Sir, it will be reaching you soon.”

  “Brilliant,” Smythe slung his rifle and secured it so it wouldn’t be swept away by the powerful force of onrushing water. “What a cock-up. What bloody else can go wrong today?”

  Adams and I found the hole where the door had been mostly by feel, the already murky water was so churned up by air bubbles that visibility was barely farther than my outstretched hand. After crawling through the newly-created hole into the spherical chamber, I tried contacting Smythe’s team. “No reply. Adams, you got anything?”

  “Nothing, Sir. We need to contact them, I don’t think they would have come deeper into a flooded tunnel. They would have gone up. If they could.”

  “Don’t worry, Adams, I have an idea. This idea isn’t even mine.”

  “What is that, Sir?” Captain Giraud tapped the side of his helmet. “Can you repeat that last? I’m picking up intermittent interference in my comm gear.”

  Smythe paused, listening to Giraud’s transmission. It was breaking up. And the interference was not entirely random. He held up a finger for silence, then smiled.

  “What does this mean?” Giraud asked when he saw Smythe’s grin.

  “It means our colonel read the after-action report from my trip through the sewers on Kobamik. He read the report, he paid attention, and he learned the same lesson I did. He also took the time to refresh an archaic skill. That is Morse code, Giraud.”

  “Ah,” Giraud smiled, understanding.

  “Captain, when I signed on with the Merry Band of Pirates, I thought our colonel was an affable, wooly-headed average soldier who got lucky. I have come to realize we are very, very fortunate to have Bishop as our commanding officer.”

  “Agreed. You are sending a reply? My own Morse skills, I am sad to say, have lapsed.”

  “Replying now. This is interesting. He and Sergeant Adams are below us, in that large chamber.”

  “Didn’t you order Adams to get the colonel and Skippy to safety?”

  “Fortunately for us, our Marine Corps staff sergeant is better at demonstrating judgment and personal initiative than she is at blindly following orders. I have the full message now, we are to swim down to the chamber; apparently Bishop has found a way out of what I remember as a dead-end. I will be interested to hear where he got all this water.”

  “Swim toward the chamber?” Giraud mused. “That is good, as that bot up ahead,” he pointed to the hulking form still visible through the murky water in the enhanced vision provided by his visor, “will not allow us to go anywhere else.”

  With a rear guard of two people maintaining visual contact with the still-lurching, slowly advancing bot, Smythe’s team swam downward at a moderate pace. There was no need for frantic speed and Smythe wished to avoid accidents. When he came around a section of the dizzying spiral tunnel, the speakers in his helmet crackled, and he could hear Bishop’s voice through the distortion. “It is good to hear you, Colonel,” Smythe said calmly, concealing his great relief.

  “I couldn’t leave Poole behind,” Bishop explained. “She’s supposed to be my babysitter.”

  “We are supposed to keep you safe, Sir,” Smythe protested.

  “Hell, Major, I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.”

  “I am telling everybody!” Skippy announced gleefully. “Surviving an idiotic stunt like this deserves to be commemorated big time. Although, hmm, we haven’t actually survived it yet.”

  Skippy continued to be skeptical as we ascended the vertical shaft, then Smythe insisted Adams and I be the first two people to winch our way up to the tunnel. Surprisingly, the water level in the shaft was only a couple meters lower than it had been before we blew the access door, that made me wonder where all the water came from. With us back on the dry floor of the tunnel, we were able to belay two extra lines, and as more people climbed out of the shaft, we had more people anchoring lines. Sooner than I e
xpected, the whole team was out of the water and we began advancing double-time up the tunnel.

  “Any bots up ahead of us, Skippy?” I asked fearfully. That trick of using the vertical shafts was not likely to work a second time.

  “How should I know, Joe?” He grumbled. “Ah, I think we should be Ok. We are so far from where the damage occurred the maintenance bots up at these levels won’t have any reason to see us as a threat, or even a nuisance. I hope. See, this is why I insisted that stupid trigger-happy monkeys don’t go shooting things. Right, Sergeant Adams?”

  “Speaking of shooting things,” she retorted with a twinkle in her eye and a wink toward me.

  I took that as a good sign that our painfully awkward conversation in the flooded access shaft was forgotten, or should be.

  Skippy was skeptical even when we saw the bright daylight of the tunnel’s entrance, and the team came out into bright sunshine. The surface team, while supremely anxious after the bots had shut down our comm relays, had followed my standing orders, maintained discipline and not entered the tunnels to search for us. Although, Lt. Williams of the SEALS team later admitted he had been within about three minutes of telling himself to screw the orders and bring his people down into the tunnels.

  Skippy was skeptical even when we boarded the dropships and dusted off hot, punching the throttles and flying supersonic right on the deck until we were a hundred kilometers from the tunnel entrance. “Ok, Joe, I think we’re safe now. If not, then we’re not safe anywhere on Gingerbread, so we are safe enough for now.”

  “You think those bots may follow us all the way to base camp?” That was alarming.

  “No. My concern is the bots in those tunnels may have communicated with other bots across the planet, and instructed them that we are a menace. Unlikely, but there is some risk, so I mentioned it.”

  “Got it. Crap. That will make it difficult for us to look for conduits in other tunnels.”

  “That will not be a problem, Joe.”

  “Why? After we nearly got trapped underground, you thought of a better way to get a conduit?” If there had been an easier, less risky way to retrieve a conduit from deep beneath the surface, I was going to be pissed at him for sending us down in that tunnel.

  “No, Joe. What I meant was, it’s over. I do not know of any other potential locations to find a conduit on this planet. I am now convinced the Elders cleaned out everything useful when they left. We will not find a conduit down here. And I don’t want any silly monkeys risking their lives in a futile effort to help me.”

  The long flight back was glum. News had gotten around that Skippy was giving up on finding a conduit and he suggested we do the same. Adams came over to sit near me. “Gunny,” I addressed her with a forced smile. None of us felt much like smiling at the prospect of being trapped on Gingerbread. Forever.

  “I wish you’d can that ‘Gunny’ shit. Sir.”

  “Sergeant?”

  She sighed and rubbed her aching right shoulder. “If I get promoted to Gunnery Sergeant, I have to decide whether to go for the Master Sergeant or First Sergeant for my E-8 step. Right now, I don’t want to think about any of that. No, Colonel,” she held up a hand. “I appreciate the gesture, but a promotion out here doesn’t mean anything.”

  “It means you’re accruing pay as an E-7 instead of E-6,” it sounded lame even to me.

  “You can loan me the difference,” she sat back in the seat.

  “You are refusing the promotion?”

  “Rank is an advantage. Never give up an advantage in a combat situation.”

  “Yeah, somebody told me that once, or more than once. Except, remember,” I sat back in my seat, more weary in my soul than I had been since- Since when? Since I was in a Kristang jail on Paradise, waiting to be executed for the crime of holding onto my humanity. “This is not a combat situation, Gunny. We’re going to be farmers here now, and we’re never going home.”

  “Really? Then why are you doing that twitching thing with your fingers, the thing you do when you’re working on a plan?”

  “I do that?” I said, forcing my fingers to be still.

  “You do. You also talk to yourself; your lips move without any sound.”

  “Crap. I’m that obvious?”

  “Not to you, you’re not.” She laughed softly. It was good to see her happy. It made me feel good. “What’s this plan you’re working on?”

  “Right now?” I leaned closer to whisper in her ear. It didn’t even make me uncomfortable to be that close to her, which surprised me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, we had been through a whole lot together. “I need to sell Count Chocula on an idea.”

  “He’s not going to like it, is he?”

  “No, he’ll love it. It means he gets rid of me for a while.”

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Before approaching Chotek to sell my next idea, I wanted to make damned sure we didn’t have a better option, that Skippy didn’t think we had any options at all. “So that’s it, then, we give up?” I asked him after we got back to base camp.

  Skippy sighed, or did a good imitation of a sigh, since beer cans do not have lungs. “Giving up sounds like I’m a quitter. Could we instead say that I am making a rational assessment of the situation?”

  “Call it whatever you like, you are still telling me to stop looking for a conduit.”

  “I am telling you it is a waste of time to search for a conduit on this planet, Joe. Clearly, the Elders dismantled, took away or destroyed almost every useful piece of technology before they departed. We are not going to find a conduit here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Joe, please, let’s cut the crap and you stop trying to give me a pep talk, Ok? You suck at it. No, I do not know for absolute certainty that there is not a functional conduit somewhere on Gingerbread. I do know with like ninety nine point nine nine nine percent accuracy that there is unlikely to be a functional conduit on this planet. The only way we could find one is if the god-like beings we call the Elders forgot about one and left it behind. Realistically, I do not see that happening.”

  “Fine,” No way was I going to argue statistics with him, I could barely pronounce the word. “What do you suggest we do, sit around watching potatoes grow until you die?”

  “No. I suggest you do something at least potentially useful, like determining where to build a permanent settlement, and get started on it.”

  “That is still giving up, Skippy. Anything we do to prepare for staying here long-term is giving up. I want to get off this planet, out of this star system, and go find a conduit for you someplace else. Uh!” I held up a finger to shush him, and to my surprise it worked. “Look, it may be a silly waste of time, but I need to feel like I am doing something useful. The Dutchman survived passing close to the star, so we still have a sort of ship up there. I want to see if we can find enough parts in the space junkyard up there to patch together a starship. If we have transport out of here, we still have a shred of hope.”

  “Count Chocula is going to tell you that is a waste of time and resources, and for once, I agree with him. The Dutchman did survive, but that strain on the lifeboat’s reactor has meant I had to almost shut it down. There is very little power aboard what used to be our ship.”

  “Will you help? All we need is one dropship and a couple pilots. Any of our pilots would jump at the chance to get off this rock while we still can; this may be their last chance.”

  “My willingness to go along isn’t your only problem. If you are going to inspect the junkyard up there, you need to take a Condor, and a full load of fuel including supplemental tanks. With all the low-level flying we’ve done for surveys down here, we don’t have the fuel to spare.”

  “I thought about that. When we were in those tunnels, you said the geothermal power systems are still active?”

  “Some of them, why?”

  “Because if we have a power source, we can synthesize fuel, right? Hell, with enough power, we can make
fuel out of air.”

  “Uh, hmmm. Technically you are correct, and we did bring a synthesizer apparatus with us, two of them actually. Ok, if you are determined to do this, I’ll help however I can. Joe, you know when Chotek hears your plan to use geothermal power to run synthesizers, he will want those units producing something more practical than dropship fuel.”

  “Why?” I winked. “Like you said, we need to find a place for a permanent settlement on this planet, and then we need to move people and all our gear there. We also need to fly recon patrols to make sure no nasties like Thuranin are sneaking up on us. That means a lot of flying time, and that takes a lot of fuel. They won’t miss one tankful.”

  “It will take considerably more than one tankful to get off this planet and fly somewhere useful, Joe. Your biggest obstacle is not obtaining fuel, it will be getting Chotek to approve a plan he is certain to view as a waste of resources.”

  “Chotek will not be a problem, Skippy. I’ll tell him we will be looking for usable technology up there in the junkyard, even if we can’t rebuild the Dutchman. Besides, you are forgetting my greatest asset.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Chotek would love for me to be away from this planet for a couple months while he builds his little kingdom down here.”

  I was right. After a moderate amount of arguing that seemed like he was merely going through the motions, my boss granted permission for me to leave the planet, and he didn’t even ask how long I would be gone. What he cared about was that we would have a steady supply of fuel for dropships, and once we had hooked up a synthesizer to a geothermal power source and demonstrated making quality fuel, he lost interest in what I was doing. Three weeks later, with tanks so full the Condor groaned from the effort of taking off, we left Gingerbread behind. Another Condor topped off our fuel in high orbit and then we were gone, beyond the stealth field. To maintain communications with the surface, we deployed satellites and high-altitude balloons to relay signals. Bandwidth would be skimpy so we could only get simple text messages through, and that was fine with both me and Hans Chotek.