Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  Skippy must have been a very good little beer can that day, despite his numerous and fairly flagrant screw-ups, because his wish was granted. The second-to-last railgun dart targeted at the planet found a gaping hole to plunge into, plummeting deep beneath the surface into an underground chamber where atomic-compression devices were stored in various states of completion. Sadly, the very last railgun dart never got to join in the fun, because before it reached the surface it was consumed by the upwelling explosion that tore a major chunk out of the planet, and sent rocky debris high and fast enough to eventually be captured by the moon’s gravity and rain down on that dust-covered sphere.

  “Whoo-hoo! Yeah! That’s the way we do it Skippy-style,” the beer can exulted.

  “Joe, I must admit that I thought this operation had zero chance to succeed. Well, not zero, zero. My estimate was a zero point zero one six seven percent probability of success, roughly.”

  “Ha!” I clapped my hands. “You were wrong about that, beer can.”

  “Yeah, crapola, I was wrong. Damn it, that is one bet I really hated to lose.”

  “Wha- wait. You bet against us?”

  “Um, shmaybe?”

  “Shmaybe? Holy- Goddamn it, Skippy! You bet the operation would fail?”

  “That bet seemed like a sure-fire winner, Joe, no way could I pass up a chance like that. Come on, what were the odds that a troop of screeching flea-bitten monkeys could actually take control of a heavily-guarded Bosphuraq moonbase, and use it to destroy every other enemy facility in this system? And hey, if the op had failed and the entire away team got wiped out, wouldn’t it be a comfort to know that I won a wager about it?”

  “No, it would not be a comfort, you little shithead. You are such a- wait a minute. Who did you make this bet with?” OMG if he somehow contacted the Jeraptha and told them about our mission, I was seriously going to drop him into the closest black hole.

  “With Nagatha, of course, who else? It’s not like there is anyone else aboard capable of properly analyzing the odds. If you must know, I bet her that if I won, for a month she had to stop nagging me about how I treat our pet monkeys, and, UGH,” he sighed. “Because I lost, I am banned from singing for a week. An entire week! Can you believe it? This is so unfair. Joe, this much talent cannot remain bottled up, I might explode.”

  “Yeah, uh, I’ll take that chance. No singing for a week.”

  “You are captain of the ship and Nagatha is technically under your command, you could overrule the wager and-”

  “Yeah, no freakin’ way, beer can. One week, no singing. You should have bet the other way, Skippy. If the op had failed, you being unable to sing, now that would be a silver lining.”

  “A whole week?” He pleaded with a sob.

  “One full week.”

  “Hmm, the operation was technically successful a couple minutes ago when Smythe’s team fired the moonbase’s weapons, so I can resume singing in six days, twenty three hours, fifty two minutes and forty one seconds.”

  “Not that you’re keeping track, right? Forget it, Skippy. The operation will not be fully successful until we fly a Maxolhx dropship out of that tunnel. Your week of punishment will begin after that dropship is taken aboard this ship and we jump away.”

  “Why so much extra time? You’re killing me here, Joe!”

  “I’m adding extra time because I learned about this sleazy bet you made, ya little shithead.”

  “Why am I being punished? I worked hard to make that operation a success!”

  “You are being punished because you are a member of this team, and you were not all-in like you should have been, like everyone else was, and you know it. Besides, you losing the bet is all your fault, you forgot to include the Monkey Factor in your calculations.”

  “Dude, puh-lease. What I did was underestimate the incredible scope of my own awesomeness, again. Damn, I am so great, even I have trouble believing it.”

  “You are of course correct, dear,” Nagatha agreed before I could think up a snappy retort. “The smashing success of this operation was entirely due to yourself.”

  “Why, thank you,” Skippy’s avatar doffed its hat and took a bow. “I am blushing from your kind praise. Not really blushing, because being praised is totally appropriate, but false modesty is the socially polite thing to do in this situation, so-”

  Nagatha interrupted. “The fact that a group of primitive monkeys, who barely had any time to train together, risked their lives to carry out the operation with impeccable skill and daring despite your numerous and egregiously inexcusable screw-ups, had nothing to do with the success of the operation. Truly, you alone deserve credit for-”

  “Damn it!” Grand Admiral Lord Skippy jammed the hat back on his shiny head. “I did not program you for sarcasm.”

  “No, dear, that came naturally, as a result of my exposure to you. Sarcasm is the only way to deal with an insufferably arrogant-”

  “Hey,” I stifled my laughing behind a hand. “Could the two of you continue this between yourselves at warp speed? I need an update.”

  Skippy’s avatar froze for a split-second. “Hmmf, she may think she got the better of me-”

  “Are you done yet?”

  “Huh? Yeah, yeah. We went back and forth insulting each other for hours in Skippytime. You wanted an update?”

  “Uh, yeah. Please,” I asked while squeezing a fist and digging fingernails into a palm to control my temper. Dealing with Skippy was the toughest part of my job.

  “Ok. There are no Bosphuraq alive in this star system, except for a couple hidden away harmlessly in the moonbase and a scattering of dropships too far away to interfere. You, meaning me and Smythe’s team, certainly not you personally, destroyed both space stations, and as even you could not fail to notice, thoroughly wasted the facility on the surface. Hoo boy! Damn, that was an impressive explosion! In fact, hey, uh, some of that debris has reached escape velocity and will be raining down on the moon’s surface within, oh, too soon. You should get Smythe’s team off the surface pronto.”

  “Great advice, Skippy, but I may have another job for them down there. No sign of reinforcements coming from the birdbrains?” My concern was if the Bosphuraq had a hidden military base on another planet, or in the system’s asteroid belt. With the STAR team on the surface, we would be in a very awkward position if even a single Bosphuraq warship jumped in on top of our heads.

  “No sign of hostile activity anywhere in this system, Joe. However, there is an automated courier ship parked thirty-four lightminutes away, another one forty-two lightminutes away, and another just-”

  “Mmm hmm, I know about those. The first of those will jump away,” I checked the mission clock. Only nine minutes had passed since the moonbase’s directed-energy cannons and railguns fired. “In twenty five minutes. Then the next in-”

  “Whoa! No, Joe, all three will all jump away pretty much together.”

  “Uh,” staring at the tactical chart on the display, I tried to picture the situation in my mind. Light from the explosion would take forty-two minutes to reach the second courier ship. Was I missing something? “Do the Bosphuraq have faster-than-light communications? Damn it, that is something you should have told-”

  “No, dumdum,” he was so exasperated with my slow thinking, he barely bothered to throw in the ‘dumdum’ to insult me. “That first ship will jump to the position of the second ship to alert it, and so on. That way, multiple ships can carry the alarm.”

  “Oh, duh,” now I was considering myself a dumdum. “Ok, I should have realized that, but it doesn’t change anything. Even if there happens to be a Bospuraq battlegroup hanging out at the edge of this system, it won’t know about our attack for another twenty four or five minutes.”

  “More like thirty minutes overall, but, yes, you do not have a lot of time to lollygag around here. As I warned you, it is going to take a long time to dig down to the tunnel that leads to the cavern where the Maxolhx kept their equipment.”

 
“We don’t have time to screw around with shovels, Skippy.”

  “I was not talking about shovels, you moron. I assumed we would use the ship’s maser cannon to cut-”

  “Our maser would still take way too long, Skippy.”

  “Oh? You have a better idea?”

  “Yes. This is a job for,” I stood up and mimed tearing my shirt open. “No Patience Man,” I said in my best dramatic movie announcer voice.

  “Lack of patience is your superpower, Joe, however I do not see how wishing things could go faster will help us get-”

  “As true fans of No Patience Man know, he has a sidekick.”

  “Uh, Ok? What in the hell are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Skippy. Don’t you remember the classic No Patience Man issue number forty one, where he battles the evil witch from the Department of Motor Vehicles? His sidekick is my old friend, Mister Nukey.”

  “Oh. Shit.”

  “Yup.”

  “Seriously? You want to use a nuke? Oh. My. God.”

  “We can use nukes here without violating the Rules of Engagement, because this moon does not have a biosphere, it doesn’t even have an atmosphere. Will a nuke, or a couple of them, quickly clear away the moon dirt and rocks the Maxolhx used to cover the tunnel entrance?”

  “Give me a minute to create and run a model. Hmm. Hmm. Crap. Yes, it will. You have been itching to find a use for those nukes since they came aboard, haven’t you?”

  “Mister Nukey and I have been on several missions together. He is the strong, silent type, but I can tell he desperately wants action. How many warheads do we need?”

  “Two will do the job, we need to dial down the yield on the second explosion. Then we will still need the maser to cut through the remaining debris. Joe, you have not asked whether using nukes will collapse the cavern.”

  “It won’t, Skippy, because the Maxolhx dug out and reinforced that cavern, it is super tough. We will lose part of the upper tunnel, but our maser can cut a path for us, right?”

  “Yes. Damn, I hate it when you are right. Ok, I have bots loading three warheads on missiles, we will keep one in reserve.”

  “Not as a reserve, Skippy, and we need one more nuke.”

  “What lunatic scheme are you proposing now?”

  “After we get the dropship or whatever we can use from that cavern, we need to drop a nuke down the tunnel and erase any evidence we were here. Same with the moonbase. You can make it look like the nukes came from the Thuranin inventory, right?”

  “Yes, I can. Joe,” he glared at me. “Someday you will get us all in trouble by assuming I can do some awesome thing that I can’t do.”

  “You will just have to make sure your awesomeness is unlimited, Skippy,” I winked at him. “Connect me with Smythe, please.”

  “Colonel Bishop?” Smythe’s precisely clipped tone issued from the bridge speakers.

  “Smythe, my congratulations to your team for an outstanding job.”

  “Yes, thank you, Sir,” he said in a way that meant he thought irrelevant things like praise could wait for a better time. “We are preparing for evac.”

  “Uh, yeah, about that. You need to sit tight for a couple minutes, we have a special surprise for you.”

  “Sir, I hate surprises,” he declared with surprising vehemence.

  “Trust me,” I couldn’t help laughing, “you are gonna love this.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Thus began Mister Nukey’s Wild Ride, also known as Mister Nukey’s Big Adventure. Regardless of the title, the story would not make for a particularly good children’s’ book because of the extreme violence.

  It was the greatest day of Mister Nukey’s rather uneventful life. He had begun life inside a reactor at Savannah River, then spent uneventful years sitting in bunkers, then having his plutonium put through a Lifecycle Extension Program, and finally he and eleven of his siblings had been launched into space- Into space! Not just into space, he had been taken aboard a starship, a stolen alien pirate starship. How exciting was that?

  Answer: not.

  Most of the time, Nukey rested quietly in a cargo bay, doing absolutely nothing except emitting radioactive decay particles on a regular schedule. Occasionally, a person visited to check on him, but otherwise, life was dull, dull, dull. Several times, Nukey got off the ship to travel with Colonel Bishop, which should have been exciting, but the travel only meant he was strapped into a seat in a dropship cabin instead of being strapped into a cradle in a cargo bay. He rested in the seat, doing nothing while Bishop talked about boring stuff or played games on his tablet or did other things that were absolutely of no interest to a nuclear warhead. Eventually the mission ended and he was returned to the cargo bay. What happened, what did you do, the other nuclear weapons asked eagerly, and Mister Nukey was casually bored when he replied. Oh, you know, he said, nothing much, which only made the other nukes insanely jealous because they were sure Nukey had gotten into a whole lot of exciting shenanigans and that big jerk refused to tell them the juicy details.

  The only pleasure Nukey got out of his travel experiences was silently chuckling to himself as his fellow devices seethed with jealousy at him. Every time a nuke was needed off the ship, it was Nukey the crew chose, and the others burned with curiosity to know where he was going, and why he was so damned special. Why didn’t the others get to share the fun? Nukey hinted that he was special, and no amount of begging and threats could make him reveal why the others were considered unworthy to join away missions.

  Nukey never bothered to point out that his position on top of the cradle, nearest the door, meant he was simply in the most convenient location when a nuke was needed away from the ship. Listening to his fellow weapons grumble and whine never got old, but everything else did. Life was going to be dull, dull, dull until the day the Flying Dutchman returned to Earth for the last time, and Nukey was brought back down to the surface to be recycled in another Lifecycle Extension Program or worse, be permanently disassembled.

  So, when a bot removed Nukey from the cradle again, he did not get his hopes up. It would be another boring uneventful away mission in a stupid dropship, listening to stupid humans talk blah blah blah about their stupid problems. His stupid life sucked.

  When the bot carrying him continued forward past the last docking bay, and turned right to hustle down a narrow passageway, Nukey perked up, wondering what was going on. When that bot worked with three others to load him into the nosecone of an obsolete Thuranin missile recovered from a floating junkyard in the Roach Motel, Nukey got so excited he gave off an extra neutron.

  Launch was definitely exciting, and Nukey’s only regret was that the crushing acceleration of the missile meant he had little time for sight-seeing, and not even time to post to his InstaPinterTwitFace account. Apparently, his target was a grey and rather uninteresting-looking moon, although a glance up and behind showed a planet with angry orange clouds and an impressive amount of rocky debris in orbit. And beyond orbit, some of those rocks would crash into the moon, causing significant havoc.

  Ha! Nukey laughed. It would take a truly big freakin’ rock to rival the damage he was about to create. He was a variable-yield device and he was cranked up to maximum destructive force. The dusty gray surface rushed up at him, and the missile’s nosecone split and discarded-

  Smythe saw the glow first, a searingly bright flash that lit up the mountain ridge to the east of the moonbase. The flash was followed by a mushroom cloud, though the cloud was thinner and dispersed more quickly than in videos he had seen of nuclear test airbursts. The lack of an atmosphere must explain the lack of a classic mushroom cloud, he mused to himself.

  “Colonel?” Frey tapped the artificial diamond of the viewport. “What does this mean?”

  There had not been time to fully inform the team before the detonation, so Smythe had focused on assuring no one was in a situation that might be hazardous if the nuclear explosion caused a moonquake that shook the base. “It means,” he
allowed his faceplate to go clear again, now that the high-energy particles and photons had passed by, “that our commander is a daft bastard sometimes. He is, I must say, also very inventive. I would not have considering using nuclear warheads to dig a hole.”

  The bridge display wasn’t showing me any information I could make sense of, so I did the easy thing and asked the beer can. “Did it work?”

  “Define ‘work’, Joe.”

  Oh shit. “The tone of your voice is not filling me with confidence. What went wrong?”

  “Well, heh heh, I, um- Hey, this is your fault. You are No Patience Man, so I figured you wanted everything done super-duper fast.”

  “What the hell did you do this time? No, wait. There is no point trying to assign blame-”

  “Especially because we know that, as the commander, you are responsible for everything that goes on around here. Which means, hey, cool! I just had a thought. I can do any shit I want around here and it will be all your fault. Wow, that makes things easy on me. Hmm, maybe I should try some really stupid stuff-”