Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “Do you have a suggestion for us?”

  “Let me think. Are there any electronics stores near you?”

  Frey leaned to the Marine Raider next to her, switching to a private channel. “Why isn’t the AI helping us?”

  “That pilot Captain Reed told me about Skippy, she was on that last really long mission,” Edward Burke explained. “I think that is Skippy helping.”

  “Heaven help us.”

  After several totally unhelpful suggestions from the beer can, a three-way conversation ensued between Smythe, Skippy and Bishop, with the STAR team listening intently. In Katie’s opinion, Skippy was not even trying to help. “Skippy,” Bishop was clearly frustrated, “there must be something we can do.”

  “Something I can do, you mean. You monkeys can’t even-”

  “What is this dingus we lost? What does it do?”

  “It’s a power regulator, as if that means anything to you.”

  “All it does is control the power flow?” Bishop’s tone was, Frey thought, condescending. “Can’t you handle that function?”

  “Through the microwormhole? Uh, no, dumdum, of course not. Plus, you know what happens when I try to regulate even my own power flow; I am not good at it. My awesomeness would burn out the generator.”

  “Skippy,” Smythe sought to bring focus back to the discussion. “Is there something else here you can use to replace the missing component?”

  “No, I am sorry, I already considered that,” the AI was much more respectful of the SAS man. “There are power regulators in your suits, in the combots and in the crawler. None of them are capable of being useful in the stealth field generator. I am very sorry about this. Joe should have requested that we bring along a spare power regulator.”

  Frey expected Colonel Bishop to react to the insult, because that is what she had witnessed the ship’s captain do before, and because any normal person would react to being blamed. Instead, Bishop laughed softly. “I did request you bring a spare, you little shithead.”

  “No you didn’t, dumdum, you- Oh, wait,” Skippy hesitated. “I have learned not to argue with one of your whacky statements. What truly bizarre idea are you considering this-”

  “The away team has two stealth field generators, right?” Bishop interrupted, which Katie thought was bad manners, but seemed to be the way guys talked. “Can we use the power regulator from the portable stealth unit, in the big unit?”

  “Um, I suppose we could do that,” Skippy responded slowly. “Perhaps you have not been keeping up on current events, Joe, so I will break it down Barney-style for you. We are using the portable stealth field now-”

  “I know that, you silicon moron. The team is now on the road to the base, with no stops along the way. Is a stealth field really necessary before the crawler gets to the base?”

  “Um, hmmm. If absolutely nothing goes wrong, then no. But, the universe seems to have a hard-on for screwing up this operation today, so you should not count on nothing else going wrong, Joe.”

  “Colonel Bishop?” Smythe asked. “I recommend we go with your idea.”

  “Smythe, I appreciate your support, but if this is an ‘in for a penny in for a pound’ thing, then we need to consider alternatives.”

  “There is no alternative, Sir. We are fully committed now. The crawler is too close to the base for us to get out here.”

  “That is not quite true, Smythe. I’ve been thinking about that subject. You could stop the crawler, get out and walk backwards along the track, using the portable stealth unit to conceal yourselves. To buy time, Skippy could report the crawler broke down. The base would send out another crawler, and we would need to explode your crawler before the repair team arrived, but you would have a chance to get somewhere the Falcon could pick you up.”

  “Pardon me, Sir, but that is poppycock,” Smythe insisted. “We did not come out here to save ourselves, we have a mission to perform. Skippy, is there any other place we could possibly get a Maxolhx dropship?”

  “Not that I know of, and as you know, I know pretty much everything,” the beer can did not add his usually smugness to the remark.

  “Colonel,” Smythe concluded, “my team is in position and ready. We are not likely to get another opportunity. Request permission to proceed.”

  “Who dares wins, Smythe?”

  “Daring acts are the only hope we have left, Sir.”

  “You are the commander on the scene,” Bishop said with a wistful sigh. “I am not going to second-guess you. Good luck, Colonel Smythe. Bishop out.”

  Smythe knew the commander did not need to say ‘Bishop out’, he had done that to assure the SAS man that no one was looking over his shoulder. Having somewhat unexpectedly gotten the freedom of action he requested, Jeremy Smythe did not know exactly what to do next. “Right,” he said as a filler while he thought. “Skippy, can you remove the power regulator from the portable unit, or do you need us to assist?”

  “A combot can do most of the task, however I will need humans for the delicate work. I will let you know when I need you.” One of the combots activated, moving carefully in the cramped crawler cabin.

  “Now,” Smythe turned to address his team, who were looking rather shell-shocked, and the fighting had not yet begun. “If anyone knows how we could screw this up even worse than we have already, please let me know.” That remark drew a couple tight grins. “That was not a joke,” he scowled. “I want to know of anything we may have forgotten that could trip us up.”

  “That’s it,” Skippy announced with rather less enthusiasm than Smythe desired. “The power regulator is attached to the big stealth unit, and phase one testing is complete and successful.”

  “How many testing phases are there?”

  “Well, three. The inspection of individual components is phase one. Two is the initial power-up, and as you might have guessed, phase three is activation.”

  “When can you perform the remaining tests?”

  “Well, heh heh, I can’t do that until we are inside the crawler garage.”

  “You idiot beer can! We won’t know if the bloody thing works until we need it?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. It is kind of a sticky situation, because if it fails at that point, we will not have time to fix it before the entire base security team arrives to blast your team into tiny pieces. Wait!” The AI implored. “This is a rare case when I am totally not screwing with you monkeys. To test the regulator requires sending power through the system, and the initial power feed causes a spike the moonbase would detect, even I can’t completely mask the effect. I would only make it worse if I tried to suppress the power spike.”

  Smythe mentally ran through a list of curse words and decided none of his inventory was sufficient for the occasion. “Go on, please.”

  If Skippy was disappointed that he hadn’t provoked a reaction, he kept it to himself. “There is no reason to expect the new power regulator will not work properly, however that component has never been used on such a large stealth generator, so I will not know for certain that it will function properly. The real test is when we activate the stealth field at max power; if the regulator is going to fail, that’s when the trouble will bite you in the ass. I did warn Joe that covering the entire base with one stealth generator is a big strain on the unit you were able to bring. I mean, to make the generator small and light enough so your team could transport it, I had to remove a lot of redundant systems and slap the thing together with duct tape. Don’t worry, it should work. I think. Never done this before, you understand.”

  Smythe’s fists clenched in the powered gloves. “When I asked if anyone could think how we could possibly screw this up any worse-”

  “Hey! It’s not my fault, I warned you against this whole lunatic scheme. Besides, a possibly malfunctioning stealth field is not your biggest problem right now.”

  “It’s not?”

  “Nope. Not even close. I just learned that when you arrive at the crawler garage, the chief engineer wil
l be there to inspect the crawler for any damage, and the officer in charge of the two knuckleheads who are supposed to be driving this thing will also be there to greet them and probably yell at them again. As a further bit of bad luck, the delays we encountered will have us arriving just before two other crawlers are scheduled to leave the garage. All this means the garage section of the base will have a lot more people than normal. Like, normally the garage only has two people on staff. Now I expect twelve or more.”

  Smythe was not overly concerned about the latest change of plans. Additional crawler crews and mechanics in the garage section of the base would not pose a significant risk to his team and, he considered, it might actually be quite convenient to have so many of the moonbase personnel in one location. None of the Bosphuraq there were likely to be armed or wearing any kind of armor protection, they would only be additional soft targets for his heavily-armed and armor-suited team. Taking out a large number of opposition early would save the STAR team from having to track them down in isolated nooks and crannies of the base later. “More people in the garage area will not be a problem. We will need to take them out immediately, before we can go through those pressure doors and up two levels to where we need to plug you into the base computer.”

  “Yeah, well, heh heh, this is kind of ironic-”

  “Bloody hell,” Smythe groaned.

  “The base has been having issues with blown circuits, so the commander has recently ordered that entire wing to power down until the problem can be fixed. The garage on the end of the wing has its own power source, but the original point where you were supposed to plug in my access device, no longer has a connection to the main computer.”

  “Show me a schematic,” Smythe asked, weariness evident in his voice. “Where can we plug this thing in?”

  “The closest point is here,” an icon began blinking in Smythe’s faceplate.

  “No good,” the SAS commando shook his head. “Getting there will require cutting through or blowing two sets of blast doors.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Ok, the closest other option is way over in the wing to the right of the crawler garage. Problem is, getting there requires going halfway to the base core, then back out.”

  “No,” Smythe observed after a moment of careful study. “It does not.”

  “Um, it doesn’t?” Skippy was puzzled. “Are you reading the map properly?”

  “I am. It looks to me like we could cross the ground between the wings, and go in, probably through this airlock.”

  “Oooh, that is risky.”

  “This whole bloody op is risky,” Smythe walked forward, stepping between people sitting on the deck, to look out through the front windscreen, if it could be called that on an airless world. The crawler garage was no more than two kilometers away, a fact he could have determined in his helmet faceplate’s display. Somehow seeing the closeness of the base made the situation more real to him. Whatever the team was going to do, they needed to act quickly. Time. He needed more time. “Skippy, we are going to slow down,” he tapped Grudzien on the shoulder and the man nodded. “Tell the base the crawler treads are experiencing a malfunction. Tell them whatever you like, but do not make the problem serious enough that the duty officer sends another crawler out to meet us, understood?”

  The crawler slowed as the two drivers pulled back on the throttles, making Smythe stutter-step and hold onto the cockpit bulkhead. To sell the ruse of a partial tread malfunction, the drivers had the crawler surge and lurch forward, making a rough ride for the occupants. “Understood what I am supposed to do,” Skippy was peeved, “I do not understand why.”

  “I need more time to consider how to get a team across the gap to the other wing, where we need to plug you in,” Smythe explained.

  “Oh, Gotcha. Ok, the duty officer is unhappy, he really hates those two dead guys, maybe we did them a favor by killing them quickly. I’m telling him the crawler can make it back to the garage, we are moving slowly to prevent causing further damage.”

  While Smythe examined a schematic of the base, Frey leaned toward Captain Poole, touching helmets. “Captain, Skippy is talking to the Bosphuraq? I read something in the briefing material that he is unable to speak with species capable of interstellar flight?”

  Lauren, taken aback by the unexpected question, turned to look in the other woman’s faceplate. “Skippy talks to higher species frequently, but they don’t know they are talking with an Elder AI. Right now, the base duty officer thinks he is speaking with the two crawler drivers we took out. The restriction on Skippy is that he can’t reveal himself to star-faring species. If he is translating for us, or like now he is pretending to be someone else, his programming doesn’t interfere.”

  “Ah. Sorry, I didn’t understand.”

  “It’s Ok, better to ask than not know. The new improved Skippy, um, you know what happened to us in the Roach Motel?” Frey nodded so Poole continued. “He has been able to release or get around some of the original restrictions, like now he can explain some higher technology with us, physics concepts, advanced math, that sort of thing. We hope-”

  “Poole,” Smythe called, summoning the Ranger with a gesture.

  Lauren pushed herself away from the crawler cabin’s wall and walked the five steps forward to confer with the team commander, grateful for the suit’s stabilizers keeping her upright. The drivers might have been overselling the supposedly malfunctioning treads, for with every full revolution of the treads, the crawler lurched. “Sir?”

  Smythe didn’t waste words. “There has been another change of plans. You will be leading the team to take the weapons control center.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The balky crawler paused on the pad in front of the big door, coming to a full stop and going through a series of safety checks before entering the garage. In the garage control center, the chief engineer swore when the exterior cameras monitoring the entire garage end of the wing glitched, froze, glitched again and then failed. Those damned circuit failures, the engineer cursed to himself, they have now somehow affected the independent power supply of the garages. He made a mental note to add that to the long list of tasks his overworked team needed to fix.

  After a brief discussion, the base duty officer gave permission to open the garage door even though external sensors had failed in that area. After all, they had seen the crawler halted in front of the door, and communication with the two crewmembers assured they were waiting permission to engage the drive again. When the door began sliding upward, there was another damned glitch! The door shuddered, stopped, and had to be brought back down to restart the procedure. Between the cameras being out and the door taking much too long to open, no one inside the base saw two figures in Kristang powered armor leap out of the crawler’s side door and race around the end of the garage wing. By the time the garage door resumed its now-smooth upward movement, the crawler’s side door was shut, and no one outside the crawler could have known the door was unlatched and ready to swing aside.

  When permission was given for the crawler to enter the garage, it did so painfully slow, irritating the waiting personnel except for the chief mechanic, who appreciated that the drivers were taking care not to make the damage worse.

  Although, the engineer thought to himself, that was odd. Even in an enhanced view from the garage bay’s internal cameras, the treads did not have any visible damage, none at all. For the crawler to be moving so unsteadily, the damage must be inside the drive mechanism, which was going to be a huge pain in the ass to fix. Replacing treads, even the entire tread assembly, was a relatively quick and simple job, but getting access to the drive unit required lifting the vehicle off its treads and removing covers across the entire bottom of the crawler. The vehicle would be out of service for two full days. Suddenly, the chief mechanic’s day had gotten much worse.

  “Do it, Skippy,” Captain Poole urged. The crawler had ground to a halt inside the garage bay, and the big outer door was sliding down. A maintenanc
e team would be walking through the pressure door at the far end, and it would look suspicious if the two dead former drivers did not open the crawler’s side door and step out to report.

  “Doing it,” the beer can’s voice came through her helmet speakers, the sound slightly muffled as he had to speak through the moonbase’s comm system. “It would be easier if your end of the microwormhole were still there in the crawler with you.”

  “You know why Colonel Smythe had to take the wormhole with him,” Poole snapped. “Can you do it or not?”

  “Yes, yes, it looks good. Remember, there will be a surge when I start the power flow. A big surge, and I can’t conceal it.”

  “I don’t care if you can conceal it, so long as you can explain it to the birdbrains.”

  “Doing my best here.”

  The chief engineer was about to step away from his console when it lit up from a power spike. “What was that?” He demanded of the base control center. Damn it. He had enough problems without some idiot trying to send power through a system that was cut off. “This wing is powered down, it wasn’t anything my team did.”

  “Hold one,” a harried voice responded from the control center. The team there had also noticed the power spike also, and a quick check determined the power had not come from any system connected to the base’s infrastructure. The duty officer was about to order a full diagnostic plus a security alert, when a message was received from the research base on the planet below.

  “Er,” the voice from the control center reported. “Looks like the research facility conducted a test that was more successful than they expected.”

  That astonished the mechanic. “A test on the planet caused a power spike up here? Did the planet explode?”

  “The planet is intact,” the officer said with irritation. “You will need to inspect critical systems for damage, starting with the main weapons.”

  Of course I will, the engineer groaned. First, though, he was going to have a little chat with some asshole down on the planet. Except, no he wasn’t, because the damned comm system was down. What else could go wrong?