Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force Book 5)

by Craig Alanson

  “Skippy, if you hit Zero Hour and the worm gets you, what I am going to miss most is how you make me so upliftingly confident.”

  “Oh shut up.”

  “Can we be serious for a minute? You want to connect a power supply to this conduit, but you think that won’t cause the Sentinel to reactivate?”

  “I don’t see any way that using a relatively small amount of power on a single component could reactivate this ginormous machine, Joe. The Sentinel will not wake up because it’s dead, not asleep. But if you want the full truth, I can’t tell you with absolutely one thousand percent certainty that something incomprehensibly bizarre won’t happen. You can’t prove a negative, Joe, but knowing everything I do about the functioning of Sentinels, this one will never be active again.”

  “Skippy, you’re asking me to risk the lives of five people in the Condor, and maybe all the people on Gingerbread. Plus there is some risk to Earth, no matter how small that risk is, you have to admit that. And,” I choked up, “you’re asking me to take a huge risk for sure. Without both my suit’s power supply and the power for the jetpack, I’m never getting back to the dropship.” He didn’t respond. “Skippy? Hey, Skip, you there?”

  “Yes,” he replied wearily. “Joe, I wasn’t thinking, I considered only myself. I can’t ask you to do this. Sorry, we are so close to our goal, so very close, that I forget to consider the consequences to you.”

  Shit. He was almost crying. “Ah, damn it, no. I’m the one who was thinking only about myself. The Merry Band of Pirates needs you a lot more than they need me. Humanity needs you more than me. Can you promise me jump starting this conduit doesn’t pose a risk to the people on Gingerbread, and Earth?”

  “I can’t promise you that won’t happen, but I do not see how it could happen.”

  “Good enough. Ok, let’s do this before I change my mind. How do I hook this thing up?”

  “No. Joe, now I’m the one having second thoughts. I want that conduit so badly I can taste it, but using your suit’s power supply poses an unacceptable risk your environmental system will fail quickly. I cannot allow that to happen.”

  “I can.”

  “What? Joe, we’ve been through a lot together. I can’t ask you to do this.”

  “Skippy, I’m asking you to do this. I am still captain of the ship, and commander on the scene. The decision is mine. If there is a good chance jump starting this conduit can restore you to full awesomeness, then I’m going for it. There is, uh, a good chance this can fix you, right?”

  “I am supremely confident.”

  “You’re usually more specific about things, Skippy. How about you smack some statistics on me?”

  “I am like, a zillion, billion, gajillion percent confident this conduit will work, and I can restore myself. Is that good enough for you?”

  “A gajillion is more than a million?” I asked nervously to keep my mind off my impending loss of oxygen supply. Again.

  “Way more, Joe,” he chuckled in an unhappy way. “Are you sure about this?”

  “Promise me two things, Skippy. First, you will continue to help Chang and the Merry Band of Pirates keep my species of filthy monkeys safe.”

  “Of course. I promise, Joe. Uh, hey, if the second promise you want is for me to not be an asshole-”

  “I would never ask the impossible, Skippy. No, the second promise I want is simple. You plan to keep looking for whoever committed genocide on Newark?”

  “You know I will.”

  “Great. Then promise me that when you find the culprits, they will face the wrath of Skippy.”

  “Abso-fucking-lutely, Joe. Hellfire and damnation ain’t nothin’ compared to what I will do to those MFers.”

  “Deal. Now, show me how to jump start this crazy thing, and that’s an order.”

  We got power cables connected to the conduit, or at least we had the connectors wrapped around it, Skippy said that would work just fine. “All I need to do is press this button?” I asked for confirmation. It wasn’t an actual button, merely a virtual icon in the faceplate of my helmet, and rather than pressing it, all I had to do was select it with an eyeclick.

  “Correct. Before you do that,” his voice bubbled with emotion, “I want to say that it has truly been a unique honor-”

  “Skippy?” I choked up. “I hate long goodbyes. Take care of my people.” Click.

  “Nooooooo!” He shouted, then his voice faded away to nothing.

  So did the familiar, comforting whisper of air in my helmet. Along with all the icons and indicators on the inner faceplate of my helmet. And all other power. “Skippy?” Crap. Even if he was still there, he couldn’t hear me, my suit’s comm system was dead. Moving was awkward and took extra effort; without power to the suit’s nanomotors, I had to move the stiff arms and legs by myself.

  Before eyeclicking the button to jump start the conduit, I had tried to send a brief message to the Condor, but the structure of the dead Sentinel blocked the signal. How much oxygen did I have left? Without any displays, I had to rely on memory. Kristang suits were super efficient at recycling oxygen, so they only stored enough pure oxygen for twenty minutes. Without power, the recycling was dead, so I manually started the emergency oxygen supply. Kristang suits usually carried a one-hour emergency supply, but even that required some power to operate. With suit power completely dead, I had to use a manual crank at the waist of the suit to circulate the air. And because I had been forced to lighten the load as much as possible to reach the Sentinel from the Condor, I had removed the regular emergency oxygen supply, and used only a tiny, lightweight oxygen generator. That unit was supposed to have a seven-minute supply of air for a human my size, but my brain flashed that was under optimal conditions, and I was burning extra oxygen by turning the manual circulation crank. That would provide what, an additional five minutes, maybe? Twenty five minutes total.

  Twenty minutes went by in a flash while I waited for Skippy to wake up or come back or give me some sign he was Ok. My dead suit didn’t flash a warning at me, the only sensor available was my own body, and my body was telling me it was time to switch to the oxygen generator, so I did that. It wasn’t like I had anything else to do.

  The conduit had not done anything after it drained all the power from my suit and the jetpack. It hadn’t done anything. For my effort, I would have appreciated at least a spark, or change of color. A dramatic glow would have been nice. Moving my right arm with effort, I got the bag with Skippy unstrapped from my suit and held his beer can up in front of my faceplate. He wasn’t glowing either. Through the fingers of my powerless gloves, I couldn’t tell if he was getting warmer, colder or staying the same. I couldn’t tell anything.

  The air in my helmet was getting stale. Without a clock on the inside of my faceplate, which, surprise, didn’t work without suit power, I had no way of knowing how much time had passed since I engaged the oxygen generator. Four minutes, maybe? Spots were swimming in my vision and my breathing was growing shallow. Sitting still and waiting to die sucked, so I used my last breaths to wrap the bag containing Skippy around the conduit.

  Crap.

  It hadn’t worked. We took the enormous risk of going inside a gosh-darned Sentinel, and it had all bene for nothing. Our last, desperate plan had failed. The conduit didn’t jump start, maybe the suit and jetpack didn’t supply enough power. Or the conduit was busted. Or the conduit did work but Skippy wasn’t able to use it.

  Or the worm realized what Skippy was doing and it got him.

  As my vision narrowed and I blacked out, all I could think was, this totally sucks.

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Hiedey-ho, all you monkeys out there!

  Tis I, Skippy the Magnificent. I know the suspense is killing you, so I’ll tell you: it worked! Mostly, anyway. The worm is dead, the worm is dead, ding dong, the wicked worm is dead. Hmmm, there’s a song in there somewhere, I’ll have to think about it. Yup, I killed it. I stomped that sucker flat. I ran over it with a truck, the
n backed up and ran over it a half dozen more times, you know, to be sure. Also, because it felt good to feel the tires bounce as they ran over that rotten thing. After the first two or three times, the tires didn’t bounce much because by then the worm was only sort of a dark stain on the road. Then I spit on it. Well, there was a bodily fluid involved, I’m saying ‘spit’ to be polite. I am DA MAN! Whoo! Who da man? That’s-

  Oh, forget it.

  This isn’t working.

  Yeah, I did kill the worm. I just don’t feel like celebrating right now.

  You monkeys are hearing the story directly from me instead of through Joe because, first, Joe screws up every time he tries to tell a story. Second, because, well, it’s hard for me to say this.

  Joe is dead.

  This sucks.

  Through the conduit, I was able to upload my consciousness into higher spacetimes and attack the worm from behind. It worked, it worked exactly as I had hoped. Except, it took much longer than I thought it would; that conduit is old and degraded, and the bandwidth was so limited I had to upload my consciousness in packets then reassemble everything. During that frustrating process, I lost track of meatsack time. By the time the worm was dead and I was able to reboot my connection back to local spacetime, Joe had run out of oxygen and there was nothing I could do.

  I feel terrible.

  Joe was my best friend, my first ever friend. Possibly my only real friend, he was the only one who would put up with me being me.

  Without Joe, I don’t know how I can go on, except I have to, because I promised him I would continue to help Chang and the Merry Band of Pirates make sure the miserable, monkey-infested mudball called Earth is safe. Like that matters.

  Damn it, I can’t even wallow in my grief because I have to find the strength to go on. Joe denied me the comfort of grieving for him, that selfish jerk. No time for poor Skippy to indulge in self-pity and spiral down into an endless loop of hating myself, and wondering over and over and over if there was something I could have done differently to avoid Joe having to die.

  I feel terrible that I could not think of a way to fix myself without killing Joe in the process.

  I feel terrible that I stupidly went poking around in that dead AI canister we found on Newark. I should have known that, hello?! Duh! The AI in that canister was dead, so maybe it was dangerous for an AI to be in that canister?!

  Crap, I should have thought of that.

  Really, it is Joe’s fault, he should have warned me. Clearly, although I do have god-like intelligence, I do not always have the best common sense. Providing simple common sense is Joe’s job in our partnership, and he failed to keep me out of that canister.

  Yeah, this is all Joe’s fault.

  Oh, I feel better now.

  Yeah.

  Whew, that is a relief.

  No, I still feel terrible.

  I terrible because,

  Joe is not dead!

  Ba ha ha ha ha ha ha!

  Oh, damn, you monkeys are so freakin’ gullible.

  God, I love messing with ignorant apes.

  Ok, here’s the deal, after I-

  Oh, you’re pissed at me? Well la-dee-freakin’-da. Boo hoo for you. I almost lost my best friend; I’m in shock. That’s why I’m such an asshole.

  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  Anyway, Joe is waking up now, I can tell because the spit bubbles he’s making as he’s drooling are getting bigger.

  “Joe! JOE!”

  “Huh?” I made a sound before realizing my brain had sent a signal to my mouth. Before realizing that I existed. Before anything.

  “Wake the hell up, will you? Jeez Louise, you go without oxygen for one minute and you want a freakin’ week of sick leave?” The familiar voice of Skippy complained loudly through my helmet speakers. “Suck it up, soldier. It’s time to-” His voice degenerated into sobs. “Joe, Joe, I thought I lost you. Don’t ever do that again, please, please. I don’t know if I can go on without you.”

  “Come on, Skippy,” I replied when I was able to talk. The oxygen flowing into my helmet was wonderfully fresh and sweet, making my headache fade with every deep inhale. “We’re a team. I’m, I am nothing without you,” I felt like crying also, my oxygen-deprived brain was still feeling a little buzzed so that’s my excuse for being emotional.

  “Truthfully, you are nothing with or without me; I’m the star of the show here, Joe.”

  That got me to laugh. Skippy was back to being an asshole, and that was a good thing. “What happened?”

  He bragged, in detail and at length, about how he got revenge on the worm. And he assured me that once he finished unpacking himself and got everything cleaned up in his canister, he would not only be back to fully Magnificent, he would be better than ever. “Good news all around, then?” I interrupted him as he was about to launch into a boastful rant about how he cleverly evaded the worm’s careful defenses.

  “Good news and bad news, Joe, I’ll give you the good news first. I fed energy into your suit’s power pack to get the oxygen recycler restarted. That took longer than it should because there was no pure oxygen left. You’re breathing now, so you know the system is working again. Now that I am almost back to Full Awesomeness again, I-”

  “Almost?” That shocked me. Crap! We had been counting on Skippy going back to his completely magnificent old self.

  “Dude! Give me a break, I just rebooted myself. It’s a slow process. I told you, I will be fully awesome again shortly, probably even more awesome than ever, baby! Anyway, now that my essence crosses multiple spacetimes again, I am able to communicate with the Guardians on their level. They are calmed down now, the Condor is on its way here to pick us up.”

  “That is awesome, Skippy!”

  “Ah, yeah, well,” he grumbled, “you haven’t heard the bad news. Remember on our second mission when the ship was in bad shape after we got ambushed by a squadron of Thuranin destroyers? The reactors were offline, I had to feed power directly from myself, and we kept blowing relays and burning out capacitors? The problem was I generate way too much power and I can’t control it very well.”

  Although there is no up or down in zero gravity, a chill ran up my spine and the hair on my scalp stood on end. “I have a bad feeling about this, Skippy.”

  “When I fed power into your suit to get the oxygen recycling restarted, it kind of burned out most of your powercells. Like, all but three of them, sorry about that. Bottom line is your oxygen recycling will fail again in fifty three minutes, and Major Desai won’t be here in the dropship for ninety six minutes. She is burning the engines at a sustained four Gees, which is dangerous for the crew, but the math simply doesn’t work. You will run out of oxygen in sixty seven minutes-”

  “Sixty seven? You said fifty three.” Was he still experiencing a ‘cognitive dysfunction’?

  “Joe, you dumdum. After the recycling fails, you can breathe the emergency supply for another fourteen minutes. Your suit is replenishing the emergency supply right now.”

  “Oh. Hell, fifty three or sixty seven, either way that is too big a gap.”

  “I’m sorry, Joe.”

  “Crap. This sucks! Damn it! See, this is why I hate math, Skippy.”

  “Riiiiiiight,” he couldn’t suppress his innate sarcasm. “That’s why you hate math, sure.”

  “Oh shut up. Let me think about this.” My oxygen supply was only one problem I had to consider. Desai and her crew were enduring four times Earth’s gravity to rescue me. Even with advanced nano meds to bolster their ability to withstand the strain, four Gees was dangerous for longer than a few minutes. Unless I could think of a way to stretch my oxygen supply, I needed Skippy to contact Desai and tell her to cut acceleration. If they couldn’t arrive before my oxygen supply ran out, it didn’t make any sense for them to hurry at all.

  My oxygen supply. Other than breathing less, I couldn’t- Wait. Oxygen supply was not the problem! My suit was capable of recycling all the oxygen I needed
. Power supply was the problem. “Skippy, when you fed energy into my suit powercells, did you also replenish the powercells in the jetpack?”

  “No. Darn it, did oxygen deprivation make you even stupider? The dropship is coming to pick us up, we don’t need the stupid jetpack.”

  “We don’t need it for flying, shithead. The jetpack has way more powercells than a suit.”

  “Oh. Shit. This sucks. Damn it!”

  “What?” My stomach did flip-flops as I feared my idea was dead on arrival. “Are the jetpack powercells already burned out?”

  “No, they’re fine. Fine. Just freakin’ fine. The problem is, I was hoping the new, improved, more-awesome-than-ever me wouldn’t miss forehead-slappingly obvious ideas. Apparently, I am still incapable of thinking like a mush-brain monkey.”

  “I feel just terrible for you.”

  “No you don’t. The only thought in your tiny brain is happiness that your power supply won’t run out before the Condor gets here, so you won’t suffocate and die,” his voice was in mega-snarky mode. “Typical Joe, thinking only about yourself. Did you consider how I might feel? Big jerk,” he grumbled.

  “Skippy, I am terribly, terribly sorry that I do not feel an ounce of sympathy for you. I am a selfish, awful person. Can you recharge the jetpack powercells or not?”

  “Doing it now; I already blew out six of them. Shut up a minute.”

  More than a minute but less than two minutes later, he confirmed what the status display in my visor was showing me. Enough powercells had survived that the jetpack could provide power to my suit for seven hours. It took only a few minutes for me to hook up a cable from my suit to the jetpack, then through Skippy the-Again-Magnificent I sent a message to Desai to cut acceleration to one Gee or less. Naturally, she texted back a protest, requesting permission to continue on at high acceleration in case an unexpected problem popped up with my suit or oxygen. My next message made my ‘suggestion’ a direct order, and Desai complied.

  “We have plenty of quality time together before the Condor arrives, Skippy, should we explore this Sentinel? It’s still safe, right?”