Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “Oh, crap.” Skippy’s jaw dropped.

  “Yeah,” I rubbed my temples to relieve the headache that was building. “So, after that ship jumps away, we need to make sure it disappears so its flight recorder is never compared to the station’s records. We need to kill another Maxolhx ship? Ok, Ok, we need to figure out how to find out when a Maxolhx ship flying on its own will approach a relay station, then-”

  Skippy interrupted me. “Why do we care if it is flying on its own?”

  “Because, dumbass, let’s say we copy the pixie of a ship that was sent by its home task force to exchange messages with the relay station. It will jump away, and then instead of killing that one ship, we have to destroy an entire damn task force.”

  “Oh. Uh, good point. I will add that to the list; um, that could be a problem. Most Maxolhx ships travel in groups.”

  “Oh, great!” I exploded. “Just freaking’ wonderful! You got any more good news for us?”

  “I can’t think of anything that could be considered good news, no, this is kind of – Ooh! Ooh! I got it! Joe, if you have to destroy two or more Maxolhx ships just to get data from a relay station, that is excellent practice for however the hell you are going to destroy those ships headed for Earth. See? Every cloud has a silver lining.”

  I bonked my head on the desk.

  “Joe? Hey, don’t blame me. It’s your planet that is in trouble.”

  Without lifting my forehead from the cool surface of the desk, I mumbled a follow-up question. “Can we forget about how many ships we need to fight? Wait,” I said slowly, giving myself time to think. “To get the flightplans of those ships, you will hack into the relay station computer?”

  “Yes, of course. Why?”

  “Uh, after you hack into the thing, can you make it forget we were ever there? That way, it will have no record of being contacted by a ship that was halfway across the galaxy at the time.”

  “Oh. Yes, I can do that. Huh, problem solved! See, Joe? You got me all worried for nothing. Now you only need to solve the billion other problems.”

  “Like Colonel Simms reminded me,” I said with a wink to my new XO, “we need to solve this problem one step at a time.”

  “Skippy,” Simms shot me a warning look. “Can we pretend to be any ship in the Maxolhx fleet, or will the relay station AI become suspicious if it has data indicating that ship is assigned to another sector?”

  “Damn it, you are both rays of sunshine today,” the beer can grumbled. “Fine, so we will just have to linger near a relay station until a Maxolhx ship arrives. Then, after it authenticates itself, exchanges data and jumps away, I can copy its pixie to authenticate us. Would that make you happy, Joe?’

  “It would make me less unhappy. All right, tell me what you need to cook up a batch of these blank pixies. You make them out of moondust or something?”

  “Whoa! Whoa, whoa, whooooa,” he dragged the word out. “No, despite my awesomeness, I can’t ‘cook up’ any pixies. They are not something you can make in an EZ-Bake oven, dumdum.”

  “A what?”

  “EZ-Bake oven, Joe.”

  “Hey, I don’t care what kind of fancy-”

  “Holeee-” he gasped in open-mouthed astonishment. “You don’t know what an EZ-Bake oven is? How can you possibly be so ignor-”

  “You can’t make one of these pixie things? Then how are we supposed to get one, or two or four however many?”

  “I can’t make even one, because we don’t have the equipment to do that, and I can’t build that kind of mechanism either. That is very specialized equipment, Joe. We will simply need to steal the pixies we need.”

  “Steal? Like, take over a ship and get the-”

  “No, no, no, you dumdum,” he laughed. “Nothing so easy like that. The Maxolhx can’t ever know we stole anything. What we need is to steal a set of blank pixies, probably from one of the two ultra-secure vaults where the Maxolhx store that critical technology.”

  “Holy shit. Before we can kill two immensely powerful warships, we need to conduct a heist?”

  “Think of it as robbing a bank, Joe. Except, you know, the bank can never know anything was stolen.”

  “Yeah, that makes it so much better.”

  “Ok, maybe it’s more like stealing the Mona Lisa, but you replace it with a fake so realistic, the museum still thinks they have the original.”

  “This is not helping.”

  “Except instead of cameras and bored security guards, the thing we need to steal is in an ultra-secure facility guarded by AIs that are suspicious of everything. Oh, and there is an army of killer bots controlled by those AIs.”

  “Are you even trying to help?”

  “Where’s your sense of adventure? Come on, this is going to be great fun! Unless, you know, we get caught, in which case you are totally screwed before we even get started. To be clear, by ‘we’ I mean you monkeys. I plan to stay safe and warm aboard the ship.”

  “Do you have a plan for this heist?”

  “Sort of. I suggest we watch ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’, both of them. There was the one with Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, and the later one with Pierce Brosnan and Renee Russo. Plus the ‘Oceans Eleven’ movies and sequels of course, and, um, oooh, ‘Entrapment’. That last one has Sean Connery,” he added in his best Sean Connery impression. “Plus both versions of ‘The Italian Job’. There are a lot of good films about heists, we could-”

  “How is watching movies going to help you with planning to steal this dingus? Couldn’t you watch every movie ever made in, like, ten seconds?”

  “Of course I already watched those movies. Watching will help give you ideas to plan to plan the robbery.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, duh. Planning crazy shit is your job, Joe. Hey, you should get moving, we might not have a lot of time. Hee hee, it’s ironic, isn’t it? We won’t really know how much time we have until after we steal the pixies, which is the reason we need them in the first place.”

  “Ironic, yeah. Wonderful.”

  “I just thought of another problem. In a good heist movie, the leader brings together a crew of colorful characters who combined have the skills to pull off the job. The leader is usually a cool, good-looking guy with charisma. Instead, we have you. Hey, maybe in our movie, the leader is a beer can, and he has a dog-”

  “You are such an asshole.”

  “A dumb, mangy, ugly, smelly dog, with fleas.”

  “I got the message. I will try to wear cool sunglasses, will that help?”

  “If they are really big and cover your whole face-”

  “Can we get back to the subject, please? What is this vault place we need to break into?”

  “Sneak into, Joe. Sneak. If the Maxolhx ever know we broke in, it will blow the whole operation.”

  “Show me.”

  He did. I wish he hadn’t.

  While my mind was reeling from the terrible shock Skippy had given me, I attended to some of the administrative tasks that Simms had been handling. It was my turn, because she was duty officer on the bridge, and I needed a break from pondering how to accomplish the impossible. First, I met with the new science team. The new people were engineers or physicists who had been aboard to study the ship’s systems. Before the Dutchman came back, some of them had been working aboard our captured Kristang troopship, the Yu Qishan, trying to understand how that ship’s reactors functioned. Despite the combined brainpower of smart monkeys from many nations, they had made about zero progress getting the Qishan’s reactor restarted before Skippy came back to give them hints. The opportunity to observe a working starship had been the reason six scientists remained aboard the Dutchman when we left Earth. I welcomed them aboard, answered as many questions as I had time for, then moved on to the next task on my list.

  Unlike previous missions where the crew was roughly evenly split among the five nations of UNEF, our renegade mission had only two people from India. Harsh Verma was a pilot aboard the Dragon dropship condu
cting maneuvers near the Yu Qishan when we lured the Dragon crew to the Dutchman with fake orders. Verma had signed up to join the Merry Band of Pirates, and I was very grateful he took the risk of volunteering. The other Indian was a woman on the science team, Jhanvi Anand, she was an electrical engineer and also was an expert in nuclear physics or something like that. Anyway, they had already been assigned cabins and knew how to find the galley and knew that Skippy’s little bots handled mundane stuff like laundry. The purpose of me giving them a tour was to show them stuff that was not on the official ship’s layout. “This,” I slapped a button to open a compartment that had originally been a cabin until the previous Indian team cleaned it out and set it up for a sort of makeshift shrine. “Is called a,” I struggled with the proper pronunciation, “a Puja Ghar?”

  “Very good,” Verma’s face lit up when I said the word correctly, and his grin grew wider when he saw inside the compartment.

  “The Indian Army team on our second mission set this up,” I waved a hand to indicate the figurines on shelves. There were several, I knew the elephant figure was called ‘Ganesh’ and one of the others was ‘Vishnu’ but I was fuzzy on the details. The room was a quiet place, reserved for meditation and worship, I knew it had been very important helping the Indian team to feel at home aboard the ship while we traveled the star lanes.

  Anand and Verma seemed thrilled to see a reminder of home. “We also have Movie Night once a week,” I explained, “and we rotate selections, so if there are any Bollywood movies you want to show to the crew, make a list. I have to warn you, Skippy loves nights when the movie is from Bollywood, because he likes to sing along with the dance numbers.”

  Anand’s shoulders slumped. She had been aboard the ship long enough to be familiar with Skippy. “Colonel, Skippy’s singing is, terrible,” she shook her head. “He tried to sing a traditional Hindi lullaby the first night I was aboard, to help me sleep. I had nightmares.”

  Verma had a different concern. “Colonel, Diwali is approaching.”

  “Is that the festival of lights?” I was proud of myself for remembering that fact. Unless I was wrong. Was it the festival of colors?

  “Yes,” Verma nodded.

  “If you want to do anything special, talk with Colonel Simms,” I advised. “A festival aboard the ship might be nice,” I mused. People needed a break from constant duty shifts and training.

  “Will we have time?” Anand furrowed her brow. “I have a mountain of technical manuals from Skippy to study,” she turned to Verma. “You must be busy with pilot training.”

  “I am,” he agreed with a grimace. “We will make time. It’s important.”

  “It is-” I was about to say something more when my zPhone beeped.

  It was Captain Poole, and she sounded in distress. No, she was laughing about something, and in the background I could hear other people laughing also. “Colonel?” She snorted. “You need, you should come to the galley, Sir.”

  “What is it, Poole?”

  “It’s hard to explain. You need to see this.”

  As I approached the galley, there was still laughter coming through the doorway. And as soon as I stepped into the large, brightly-lighted compartment we used for cooking and dining, I saw why.

  Behind the counter, standing there ready to pour coffee or hand out plates or whatever Skippy had assigned her- No, damn it, not her. It. It was an it. It was ‘Anastacia’ the sexbot. Fortunately, this time, she, it, was wearing clothes. Unfortunately, she was dressed in a sexy French maid outfit. “Skippy!” I bellowed, my face already beet red.

  “Hello, Joe,” he said innocently from the speaker in the ceiling. “Are you hungry already?”

  “You know exactly why I called you. What is that doing here?” I demanded while avoiding the eyes of people in the galley, and avoiding looking at the sexbot.

  “Anastacia?” He feigned surprise. “The crew is short-handed, Joe. She will be helping out in the galley, and with stuff like laundry. I told you, she was not designed for heavy-duty maintenance tasks, so I can’t assign her to working on reactors or anything hazardous like that. We can’t waste resources, she needs to do something aboard the ship. I thought of assigning her to sickbay, but her fingers are not capable of performing surgery. Her fingers were designed for, you know, other things,” he hinted with a verbal leer. “Are you sure you don’t want to give her another test ride?”

  “There was never a first test ride!” I protested, looking to Poole for confirmation, but she had her face hidden behind her hands, her shoulders convulsed with laughter. I wasn’t getting any help from her, and everyone else in the galley was new to the crew, they had not witnessed the first incident with Anastacia.

  “If you say so, Joe. Hey, what happens in your cabin stays in your cabin, right?” He chuckled.

  “Oh, for- Make her, it, put some clothes on, damn it.”

  “She is wearing clothes, Joe,” he said as the sexbot slowly winked at me seductively.

  Gritting my teeth, I looked at the ceiling. “You know what I mean. Laundry and cleaning and whatever you want is fine if you need her, it, to be useful. Keep it out of the galley and put some shapeless coveralls on it. That’s an order.”

  Anastacia lifted her head up and snapped me a salute, unfortunately that gesture caused her, um, assets to jiggle. “Yes, I’ll do anything you say, Joey,” she agreed.

  “Oh this can’t be happening again,” I couldn’t take it anymore. Turning toward the door, I pointed at Poole. “Captain, see that this thing is removed from the galley, and stays out of my sight.”

  “Coffee, Sir?” Smythe asked as I dared to walk into the galley a couple hours later. Ok, maybe I stopped and look through the doorway before going in to make sure there was not a sexbot waiting for me.

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “A demon from hell would be preferable to the ghost I’ve seen. Has Skippy told you the first problem we need to tackle?” I knew Skippy talked with the entire crew all the time.

  “No, Sir, he has barely spoken with me today, except for what necessary during our training exercise.”

  “How was the exercise?”

  Smythe avoided my eyes, stirring cream into his coffee. He had not mentioned the sexbot and he was going to avoid the subject. “It is good that you are still working on a plan, Sir, because my team is not ready to implement.”

  “That bad?”

  “Integrating my people into a cohesive team with a common set of tactics will be,” he took a sip of coffee. “A challenge for me.” He then changed the subject smoothly. “What challenge did the beer can hit you with?”

  I briefly explained about pixies. “These damned things are stored in only two places in the entire galaxy. Skippy’s opinion is it is impossible, absolutely impossible, for us to get into one of those vaults. The Maxolhx designed their vaults to be secure against the Rindhalu, and although we have Skippy, he is working with inferior technology,” I swung a finger in the air to indicate the Flying Dutchman around us. “No way to get in, sure as hell no way to steal a set of blank pixies and get away without being detected.”

  “I’m sure you will think of something,” Smythe forced a smile. He sucked at small talk.

  “Maybe. Skippy also hit me with another problem; we need a Maxolhx dropship.”

  Smythe lifted one eyebrow. “Sir?”

  “The pixies only allow Skippy to authenticate us as an authorized Maxolhx starship, to establish communications with a relay station. To be sure of getting all the data we need, and to erase all evidence we were there, he needs to go aboard a relay station. Obviously, we can’t go aboard a station that has a Maxolhx crew, so he is giving me a list of automated relay stations. He can fake our signature so, from a distance, the Dutchman looks like a Maxolhx starship, but to go aboard, we need a genuine Maxolhx dropship.”

  “Why would a dropship crew need access to an automated relay station?”


  “Skippy is confident he can sell a bullshit story about the dropship crew being there to install upgrades, something like that. Once he gets aboard, he can take control of the station’s AI and it won’t matter whether the thing believes our story. The point is, we not only need to steal a set of these pixies, we need a Maxolhx dropship, a real one.”

  “Perhaps that is where we should start, then,” Smythe suggested. “Dropships must be scattered all over the galaxy. Nicking one must be easier than breaking into a pixie vault.” One corner of his mouth turned up at the word ‘pixie’, he must have found that amusing. As a soldier, I did not like saying that our mission was to obtain something I associated with fairy dust, but I was not going to say ‘Paired Quantum-State Interchanger’ every time.

  “Oh, sure,” I sipped coffee that was strong even by Army standards. “Piece of cake.”

  For my last task, or to be honest the last thing I could do to avoid thinking about how impossible our mission truly was, I went to inspect the hydroponic gardens. To inspect, and to send some time around green growing things under the special grow-light bulbs we had brought from Earth. The grow-lights mimicked the spectrum of sunlight on Earth to help the plants grow quickly, and they were good for my mood. The lighting elsewhere inside the ship were Thuranin units that were much more efficient and lasted much longer, but their output was artificial and kind of harsh and they were tuned to match the spectrum of sunlight on the Thuranin homeworld, which looked slightly off to human eyes. Colors appeared subtly different under the Thuranin lighting, not enough to cause problems, but enough to be noticeable even if people initially did not know why they thought something was wrong.

  Anyway, it was nice to be in the gardens, seeing green things sprouting and growing, and helping them grow. Even Smythe enjoyed working in the gardens, although he rarely had time to send more than a few minutes there.

  When I walked in, after scrubbing my face and hands and putting on coveralls and a hairnet, Simms was there with three of the science team.