Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “It scares me too, Skippy. What do you mean by ‘dead’?”

  “It is not generating or using any power. It is tumbling out of control. I pinged it, and it did not respon-”

  “You PINGED it?!”

  “Yes, duh. How else was I supposed to-”

  “You found a giant, super-powerful killing machine that is guarding an Elder star system we are ransacking, and your best idea was to say ‘Hey, how you doing’?!”

  “Oh. Hmm. Sorry. In retrospect, that may not have been my best idea ever. Anywho, no harm, no foul, right?”

  “No harm so far, you little shithead. You said there could be more than one Sentinel here. What if your ping woke up another one?”

  “I said I was sorry, Joe. Jeez Louise, let it go, will you?”

  I just glared at him in disbelief. “Skippy, are you experiencing another cognitive deficit or whatever you call it when you act like you’re drunk?”

  “No, why?”

  “No reason. Other than you just doing the single dumbest thing you’ve ever done.”

  “Oh, heh heh,” he laughed nervously. “That was the single dumbest thing you know of, Joe. Truthfully, pinging a Sentinel isn’t even in my Top Ten. Damn, I have done some really stupid shit I haven’t told you about and- uh. Hmmm. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Ya think? Ok, so, where is this Sentinel? We’ll back away from it real easy, and-”

  “What? Back away from it?” His avatar folded its arms across its chest. “No, dumdum. We need to rendezvous with it.”

  I stared at the avatar for a long second, then shook my head incredulously. “Uh, excuse me? Pinging the damned thing wasn’t good enough, now we need to go knock on the front door?”

  “No one’s home, Joe. Trust me.”

  “Trust you? Right after telling me you’ve done stupid shit I don’t even know about?”

  “Ugh. Your meatsack memory is terribly inefficient. I should be able to erase your memory of what I said just then, but nooooooo. You freakin’ monkeys remember all the wrong stuff. Yes, Joe, we need to fly over to this Sentinel and check it out.”

  “Because? Whatever you say next had better be good, Skippy, like epically good.”

  “It is, Joe. It is almost certain we can find a conduit inside that Sentinel.”

  Oh crap. That actually was a good reason for us to go poking our noses in places our noses did not belong. “Almost certain?”

  “Like, I would give a billion to one odds that we will find a conduit there. Using conduit capability to manipulate local spacetime is how Sentinels function. That capability is how they reside in and draw power from higher dimensions. It is how they can disrupt stars and tear starships apart. Guardians use a similar technology, although on a much lower scale, and conduits are not native to Guardians; they just temporarily use conduits located outside this spacetime.”

  “Uh huh.” I was underwhelmed.

  “Come on, Joe, this is exciting! We finally found what I need to fix myself.”

  “Maybe. We might have found a conduit we can use. We’ve had two failures with conduits we’ve found so far. What makes you think a conduit inside a broken Sentinel will still be functional?”

  “Because it will not be ‘a’ conduit. Considering the size of the fragment I found, there should be hundreds of devices I can use as a conduit. We only need one. Joe, uh! Let me talk, please.” His avatar held up a finger to shush me. “This is our golden opportunity. I didn’t mention it to you before, because there is no reason to worry you about things you can’t control, but over the past forty eight hours, the worm has been increasingly active. To combat it, I am draining more and more power from my internal reserves. If we don’t find a conduit soon, like within the next twelve days, I am likely toast. And so are you, in the long run.”

  “Crap. Skippy, in the future, I do need to worry about that type of thing. Ok, tell me one thing; if you are certain a Sentinel has the conduit capability you need, why didn’t you contact one when we got here?”

  “Because a live Sentinel would most likely stomp me flat for violating like, every rule the Elders have,” he responded quietly, and didn’t even add the usual implied ‘duh’ in his tone. “The only reason the Sentinel I found is an opportunity rather than a danger is that it’s dead as a doornail. The idea that anything in this galaxy can kill a Sentinel scares the shit out of me, but this one is dead.”

  “Twelve days, huh?” I rubbed my chin, and Skippy’s avatar took on a pitiful, helpless expression he must have learned from watching sad puppies on Instagram. “How long for us to get the Sentinel?”

  “Just over five days at maximum acceleration. To be precise, one hundred twenty one hours, thirty eight minutes and-”

  “That’s precise enough, thank you. Oh, hell,” I felt a whopping headache coming on already. “I need to get an Ok from Chotek about this.” Messing with a Sentinel was something our mission commander was not going to like one bit. “Time for a roundtrip signal to Gingerbread is?” I checked the display but Desai answered for me.

  “Sixteen minutes, Colonel,” she replied, and looked at me with one eyebrow raised and one finger poised over the autopilot button.

  I nodded as I relaxed back in my seat and engaged the safety straps for acceleration. “Get us moving toward the Sentinel, Desai. We’ll need all the time we can get if Chotek approves this crazy plan.”

  “Yes, Sir,” she acknowledged. “Prepare for sustained acceleration.” She turned to look me straight in the eye. “What if Mister Chotek does not approve us approaching a Sentinel?”

  “Then,” I took a deep breath, “I will have a decision to make.”

  Twenty nine minutes later, we received a short message ‘Take no action at this time. Instructions to follow’. That was Chotek’s way of telling me he was thinking about it, and that I should wait for his decision. As we were already burning hard to intercept the Sentinel, I interpreted ‘take no action’ to mean that we should take no action to cease our acceleration. I know that was bullshit, but I was grasping at straws. “Skippy, are there any potential junkyard targets along our current course?”

  “Whew. Technically, no, but if we alter course within the next forty eight minutes, we could reach a cluster of potentially useful junk. After that, we will be headed away from any plausible targets for our original mission.”

  “Forty eight minutes?” I repeated thoughtfully. “It will take eight minutes for Chotek’s signal to reach us out here, so he has another forty minutes to make up his mind.” In my message to him about the Sentinel, I had included the information that Skippy estimated the worm would get past his internal defenses within twelve days. While that should have impressed on our mission commander the urgency of the situation, and that the broken Sentinel may be our last hope to fix Skippy, I don’t know if Chotek would believe me. He may think I faked Skippy’s twelve-day deadline as a way to convince him to approve the mission to the Sentinel. My credibility with our mission leader was not the best. It was frustrating that the speed-of-light time lag made it impossible to have a real conversation.

  We did not have to wait forty eight minutes for an answer; a second message was received seven minutes later. Chotek denied permission for us to investigate the Sentinel, and further, he ordered me to avoid coming anywhere near the dangerous Elder machine. Chotek thought the risk was too great that us poking around a Sentinel, even one supposedly dead, would trigger other Sentinels to destroy humanity’s home planet.

  “Colonel?” Desai looked at me expectantly. The message had been directed to me personally, so she hadn’t read it.

  What the hell was I going to do? A quick glance at the clock told me we had another forty one minutes until I would be directly violating orders. “Continue on present course,” I told Desai, and the tone of my voice must have alerted her to the content of Chotek’s message. “We have another forty one minutes before we are technically violating orders,” I explained, so Desai did not have to participate
in a mutiny.

  “Yes, Sir,” she replied quietly, avoiding my eyes. She sat stiffly in her couch, with one finger tapping slowly on a blank part of the flatscreen controls, like she was working up to say something to me.

  “Desai, I’m going to request a confirmation,” I looked down at my own console and began typing, partly to avoid a discussion with her. Forty one minutes. I had forty one minutes to decide whether I was a United States Army soldier, or a pirate. If I was a pirate, then there were no rules, no restrictions on our conduct. I would be representing myself rather than humanity, and I would be substituting my own inexperienced judgment for that of UNEF Command, in the form of Hans Chotek.

  A mutiny would be easy to do, except for two things. First, Chotek had been right and I had been wrong about us going to Paradise. On my own, I would not have taken the ship there to check on the status of humans trapped on that planet; I had been afraid of learning humans there were in danger that we couldn’t do anything about. Humans on Paradise had been in danger, but we had found a way to secure their future. Being wrong about that issue had been a humbling experience for me; until then I had been feeling pretty cocky about saving Earth twice. Chotek had also been right about insisting we perform an intermediate jump to recon Bravo before approaching that site; if we had followed my plan the Dutchman would have been trapped by the powerful damping fields of a Thuranin task force. About Paradise and about Bravo, Chotek’s judgment had been better than mine.

  The second thing that held me back from mutiny was the nagging feeling that maybe, just maybe, Chotek was right again this time. Maybe us messing with a Sentinel, even if doing that could fix Skippy, was not worth the risk of provoking other Sentinels.

  It was a judgment call, and the entire reason UNEF Command had assigned Hans Chotek as our mission commander was to make important judgment calls.

  Because UNEF Command didn’t trust my judgment.

  Maybe they were right. I had an emotional connection with Skippy; my ability to think objectively might be impaired.

  I had forty one minutes to think about that.

  Margaret Adams was not invited to the emergency meeting in Chotek’s tent; that audience had been limited to Lt. Colonel Chang, Major Smythe and Major Simms. All she knew was that a message had been sent from Colonel Bishop to Chotek, that three senior officers had been called away from their regular duties, and when he came out of the meeting, Smythe’s face was as grim as Adams had ever seen it. She had arranged to be in the path between tents that Smythe was likely to take after leaving Chotek. “Major? What’s going on?”

  Smythe shot a look back over his shoulder to where the flap of Chotek’s tent was just closing. The mission commander had not instructed the three officers to keep quiet about the subject of the meeting, which would have been foolish anyway. “Walk with me, Sergeant,” Smythe said in more of a request than an order. “Bishop located a Sentinel out there.”

  “A Sentinel?” Adams gasped, a chill of fear running up her spine. “I can see how-”

  “You don’t understand,” Smythe shook his head curtly, motioning her into a side passageway. “Skippy reported the Sentinel is dead, what they located is only a broken fragment.”

  Adams’ shoulders remained tense. “No danger then?” She asked, thinking that was unlikely given the expression on the SAS man’s face.

  “Not according to Skippy. He wants to explore the fragment, in hope of finding a conduit; apparently there is a strong probability a conduit will be found inside what is left of the machine. Bishop agrees, and requested permission to proceed toward the site to investigate with a proximity sensor scan.”

  Adams understood the source of Smythe’s unhappiness. “And our fearless-”- she caught herself, aware she was speaking with an officer. “Our mission commander refused permission?”

  “Quite so,” Smythe’s eyes narrowed, judging her reaction to the news. “There is a complication; Bishop reported Skippy estimates he has only twelve days remaining until the worm breaks through his defenses.”

  “Twelve days to Zero Hour?” Adams cocked her head. That couldn’t be the whole story. “A deadline like that should be a strong reason to search that Sentinel for a conduit.”

  “It is a strong reason, Chotek agrees. He thinks perhaps it is too strong, too convenient that Skippy’s failure is imminent at the same time we have a hazardous opportunity to find the one thing that could fix our AI.”

  “Chotek thinks Bishop is lying about it?” Margaret Adams was astonished. And angry.

  “There is unfortunately not a large reservoir of trust between our mission commander and our captain. Chotek may think Bishop is exaggerating, or revealing only the facts that support his request. Or that Skippy is lying to Bishop, or guessing. There is no trust between Chotek and the,” Smythe’s jaw worked side to side as if he were chewing on something unpleasant. “Beer can. That lack of trust is Skippy’s own fault. Where are you going, Sergeant?” Smythe asked as she strode past him.

  “To speak with our mission commander.”

  Chapter Twenty Three

  My zPhone vibrated, it was a text from Skippy. Need to talk with you privately, the message read. I fitted the earpiece in and floated back to the Condor’s cargo compartment. “What’s up, Skippy?”

  “We have only eleven minutes until you have to decide whether to ignore Chocula’s orders.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I had been watching the time on my zPhone, and Desai had been glancing back at me through the open cockpit door. My response had been to cowardly avoid eye contact with our chief pilot.

  “I’m surprised by you, Joe, and disappointed. You are putting Major Desai through stress that is unnecessary. We all know what you are going to do, so get on with-”

  “I don’t, Skippy.”

  “Uh,” Skippy wasn’t often at a loss for words, this was one of those times. “You, don’t, what?” He asked slowly.

  “I don’t know what I am going to do, Skippy.”

  “O.M.G., Joe!” His screech blasted in my ear and I reflexively pulled the earpiece away. “Dude, you have got to be kidding me! Listen, this loyal soldier crap has gone too far; are you seriously going to obey Chocula’s orders just because he is technically your commanding-”

  “No, Skippy. Not just that, but you have to understand; I am an Army officer and disobeying lawful orders isn’t something I can do easily. My problem is, he may be right.”

  “Really?” His voice dripped with icy sarcasm. “Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whoa. Holy shit. You don’t trust me. After all we’ve been through, you do not trust me.”

  “It’s not-”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Ok, yes, it is. I trust you to tell the truth, or as much of it as you think I need to know. What I don’t, what I don’t know if I can trust, is your judgment. You assured me there was no danger to you poking around in that dead AI canister.”

  “Oh, for- That was one time!”

  “And you assured me we could jump into the Roach Motel here without a problem, and you broke the freakin’ ship!”

  “All right, fine. So I made two mistakes.”

  “You also sent us on a wild goose chase to find this conduit thingy, and so far every place you said we could find one, we either flew into an ambush, or the conduit doesn’t work.”

  “That’s the conduit at Barsoom, then the one where the Thuranin were waiting for us, and the burned-out one in the tunnel on Gingerbread. Three. Ok, so I made five mistakes. That’s, hmm, crap, I guess that is a lot of mistakes in a short time. But I’m telling you, this dead Sentinel absolutely will have conduits, and-”

  “And whatever killed the Sentinel will not have burned out the conduits?”

  “Crap. I hadn’t thought of that. Thanks a lot, Mr. Buzzkill.”

  “I’m trying to be serious, Skippy. I have to balance the risk of screwing with a super-powerful killing machine, with the slender possibility of finding a working conduit that might fix you.”

  “You won
’t do it?”

  “I have been ordered not to do it, Skippy.”

  “I will ask the question like Sergeant Adams does, Joe. Yes, or no? We are both running out of time.”

  The Army trained me to make decisions based on incomplete information, since nobody ever has all the info they want. They trained me to make decisions quickly, and to live with the consequences. They did not train me how to decide whether to disobey a direct order.

  I did not know what to do. If Skippy was wrong and there was no conduit in the Sentinel, or the conduits were all burned out, then I would be committing mutiny for nothing, and my authority would be gone. If Skippy was wrong and me screwing with a Sentinel caused retaliation against Earth, I could be condemning my entire species for nothing. But if Skippy was right, then we could fix him so the Merry Band of Pirates might go on protecting Earth.

  One way or the other, I needed to make a decision.

  “Skippy,” I said. My instincts were telling me to-

  “Colonel Bishop?” Desai called from the cockpit. “You have a message,” she announced just as my zPhone pinged.

  It was from Chotek.

  Investigate Sentinel for conduit at your discretion. Proceed with extreme caution.

  “Whoo hoo!” Skippy exulted, having read the message before I did. “Hey, Joe, what were you going to say?”

  “It doesn’t matter now. Desai! We are cleared to approach the Sentinel!” I read the message again. “I wonder what changed?”

  “My guess,” Skippy announced dryly, “is someone performed a spine transplant on Count Chocula.”

  “Somebody helped him grow a backbone, huh?” I mused. “If we get back to Gingerbread, I’ll have to ask Sergeant Adams if she was involved.”

  “Joe, you really are not going to tell me what you decided to do, before you got Chotek’s message?”

  “Let it be a mystery, Skippy.”

  Everything was great for a short time, then Skippy ruined my hopeful mood. “Hmmm. Hey, Joe, we have, heh heh, another potential problem.”