Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “More humiliating than acting as a doorstop?”

  “Don’t push your luck, monkeyboy. I told you to stand back from the door in case something broke, now I need you to do the opposite. Get close to the door edge and follow it, you may need to set me down in front of it very fast. When that happens, you run like hell, Joe, you need to be clear before I can do my trick.”

  “Gotcha.” The gloves of the flightsuit did not have a super crushing Kung Fu grip like infantry armor did, but flightsuits did have power assist, so it was easy to hold his beer can in one hand. Crouching down, I held him just in front of the door’s edge as it slowly moved backwards, vibrating and jerking as it went. It pissed me off that the Maxolhx couldn’t have sprayed some WD-40 on the door mechanism before they abandoned the place, they are real jerks.

  As the door slid, I awkwardly duck-walked sideways, ready to drop Skippy in place and run. “Oh, hey,” I grunted in surprise as I needed to use both hands to hold him. “You’re getting heavy.”

  “The door mechanism may fail at any moment so I am getting ready. Set me down and slid me along, you will not be able to hold me up.”

  Doing as he suggested, I risked a glance back at the Falcon. “How far does the door need to open for the Falcon to fly through?”

  A strip of light shone on the floor of the tunnel, it made a line about three meters away. “That far, Joe. That is the absolute minimum and even that will be denting the fenders as the Falcon squeezes through.”

  “We can buff that right out, don’t worry about the Falcon.”

  My heart skipped a beat as the door’s movement became more halting and jerky while I got on my knees and pushed Skippy along. He was heavy, like I guess he must weigh fifty pounds or more, and it seemed like he was heavier on the bottom than on top. That was smart of him, being bottom-heavy would prevent him from tipping over, because a rolling beer can would be useless to stop the door from sliding shut. “Just two more feet,” I announced while I stared at the line of light Skippy was projecting.

  “We’re going to make it! By the way, I have good news and bad news. There are three dropships in that cavern, however only one of them can be made flightworthy.”

  “One is all we really need,” it was hard to keep the disappointment out of my voice. “Can we swap parts around to make one of the others flyable?”

  “No can do, Joe. We will need to strip parts from the two junkers just to get that one off the ground. It is an easy job and should not take long.”

  “I hope so,” the door slid just past the critical line and kept going, I didn’t say anything from fear of tempting fate. “This is taking way too long.”

  “Doing the best I can, whoa!” The door shuddered, ground to a halt, then resumed sliding backward. It was now a full meter past the critical mark. “That was scary, we’ll give it another-”

  The door’s mechanism broke. Skippy did not need to order me to get out of the way, I felt the door pushing back hard so I released him and used my flightsuit’s power-assisted legs to jump backward and up, nearly hitting the ceiling of the tunnel in the low gravity. The flightsuit computer also assisted my clumsy landing so I came down on my boots rather than my helmet.

  Skippy was growing larger, he was the size of a can of paint, then a drywall bucket before the door stopped moving.

  Unfortunately, the door had slid inexorably forward while he was increasing his mass, and the opening was now too narrow for the Falcon to fit through. “I am sorry, Joe,” he sighed. “I did the best I could. Damn it! This was all for nothing. This sucks.”

  “Colonel, he is right,” Pope called. “Even if we could fly the Falcon at a steep angle rolled to one side, it won’t fit through that doorway.”

  “Is there anything we can do, Joe? Perhaps if another dropship were to fly down here, we could use it to tow the Falcon back out of the tunnel. Hmm, no, that won’t work.”

  “We don’t have time for that anyway, Skippy,” I walked to stand directly in front of the Falcon. Even with its wings fully retracted, they were too wide to fit through. Removing the wings would not solve the problem, as the wings fit into pods sticking out from the top sides of the hull, where the pods also contained maser cannons. “Pope, button up your suit and get out here. We have work to do.”

  “Sir?” He asked. “What work?”

  “It’s simple. The Falcon is too wide to fit through the door. If the ship was hungry, I’d say we grease the edges of the door and toss a Twinkie into the cavern,” he chuckled at my joke. “Since it is not heavy, we need to cut away part of the hull.”

  “Cut away?”

  “Unless you have a better idea.”

  After slight hesitation, Pope responded. I could hear his seat harness being unbuckled. “Be right there. I’ll bring the cutting torches.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  By the time we were done, we had a pile of parts that had been sliced off the Falcon, giving us a half meter of clearance on each side. Basically, we had sliced right through the wings and entirely cut away the bulges on top and bottom that housed the wings and some of the weapons, shaving away anything that stuck out from the oval-shaped hull. Our quick and dirty work had rendered the Falcon useless for future missions, which did not matter because if the current mission did not succeed, there would not be any future missions. To avoid foreign object damage to the Maxolhx dropship we would hopefully be flying out of the cavern, we opened the Falcon’s back ramp and stuffed all the junk we cut off inside. Then we got back in the cockpit and prepared to move. Note that I said ‘move’ and not ‘fly’, because we did not need the Falcon to fly with its wings clipped.

  “I have never done this before,” Pope told me with a tentative thumbs up as we completed the checkout procedure. Some of the stuff we cut away had included power conduits and other components important to the operation of the craft, the checkout confirmed that backup systems had taken over enough for the Falcon to do what little we needed it to do.

  I feigned surprise. “You have never guided an alien spacecraft through a doorway inside a tunnel under the surface of a moon thousands of lightyears away from Earth?”

  “That too, I was talking about guiding the ship while it is sliding down a tunnel, not flying.”

  “Pope, you are a real pilot. If you like, I can do this, so you can blame me if we crash into the door or anything else?”

  “My aircraft, Sir,” he answered firmly.

  “You got it. Releasing gecko grip,” I announced, deactivating the feature of our landing skids that allowed them to cling to the tunnel floor.

  That part of the tunnel, so close to the cavern, was not a steep slope, so our wingless Falcon did not rocket forward, it gradually picked up speed. Pope used the side thrusters to keep us on course through the doorway, while I puffed the nose thrusters to keep our progress at a steady pace. As we approached the doorway, the sensors showed we were within half a meter of the optimum center line, which was great except we only had half a meter to spare on each side. Pope saw the problem and corrected, that threw us too far to the other side. “You Ok out there, Skippy?” I asked to burn off nervous tension.

  “Holding for now. Remaining in this condition uses a lot of power, Joe, I urge you to move quickly.”

  “Uh huh, going fast as we can.” We were drifting off course again. “Uh, Pope-”

  “I see it, this is awkward, Sir.”

  The nose of the Falcon slid through the doorway and everything looked great, except we were too far to the right of the centerline. With a jolt and a screeching sound of tearing composites, the Falcon hit the doorway and lurched to the right, slowing almost to a halt. We could not allow the ship to block the doorway. Without waiting to alert Pope, I blipped the main engines and the Falcon skidded forward, forcing itself to scrape along the right side of the tunnel and through the inner airlock door. That doorway had a lip on both sides, the Falcon struck the right-side lip about three meters behind the cockpit and the tearing sounds got really lou
d. Figuring I could not make the situation any worse, I went all in and goosed the throttle again, forcing the Falcon forward into the dark cavern beyond the inner doorway. In a tribute to my sound judgment, everything went great until the Falcon was three quarters of the way through and something big, heavy and important tore loose behind us. Whatever it was, it caused an explosion that threw our ship forward and to the left. The Falcon rolled to the left, the right side skid lifting off the tunnel floor, then crashing back down to rock side to side. With the synthetic display provided by Skippy showing the cavern in front of us was clear for at least a hundred meters and the Falcon no longer being pulled forward by gravity because the cavern floor was level, I inched the main engine throttles forward again, only this time the action caused the Falcon to twist to the right. Pope compensated by firing the starboard nose thrusters hard, heeling us back toward a straight course. There was a loud BANG behind us as something exploded, and I hit the emergency button to kill power flow to the engines. We were still moving forward, skidding across the floor, and stack of what looked like crates under a tarp loomed in front of us. We had no brakes so Pope engaged the thrusters in the nose, slowing us enough so the nose hit the stack of crates just hard enough to knock them over and the Falcon’s nose rode up the stack to come to a precarious halt.

  “Wait, wait,” I held up a hand to stall him as he was poised to kill main power. The cockpit displays were still working, I checked our position, making sure we were well clear of the doorway. Success! We were far enough from the door that we could have flown a Falcon through the gap, and Skippy said Maxolhx dropships were smaller. “Ok, we’re good, kill the power before something else blows up.”

  Skippy helped a lot by groaning loudly. “Joe, on behalf of all monkeykind, I am revoking your pilot license.”

  “Skippy, I never officially had a pilot license. Plus, we were not actually flying at the time.”

  “The Colonel is correct, Skippy,” Pope agreed shakily. “Sir, respectfully, if we did not fly together for a long time,” he threw up his hands, “that would be great.”

  “Hey, it worked, didn’t it? Sometimes the brute force method is appropriate.”

  He was not convinced. “If you say so, Sir.”

  “It’s a guy thing. Skippy, where are these dropships?”

  “They are in separate hangars along the wall to your left, give me a minute and I can- Yes!” Lights snapped on in the cavern.

  No, there were no individual lights, the entire cavern ceiling glowed evenly. There were darker areas in the overall glow, like a section was missing a few pixels or whatever. With the light on, the cavern was revealed not to be craggy dark rock excavated to form a rough working space. All the surfaces were smooth, and the cavern was big. Big, like, the far end had to be a kilometer away, and the center of the domed ceiling was maybe five hundred feet above my head. “Why is this place so big, Skippy? If the kitties needed all this room, why didn’t they just inflate a dome on the surface?”

  “Structures on the surface of an airless world are too vulnerable, Joe, especially in a star system like this one, with a greater than usual amount of comets and meteors drifting around. Incoming rocks hit harder here because there is no atmosphere to slow them before they impact the surface, and ejecta thrown up and outward by impacts travels far, wide and fast. That is why structures like the moonbase we just captured are covered with a thick layer of regolith.”

  “Uh yeah,” I rolled my eyes, “that is a great safety tip for the vacation place I was thinking of building on the moon. You didn’t answer my question.”

  “I did not answer your question because I do not yet know the answer, you knucklehead. It is puzzling what the Maxolhx used this facility for, I am researching. While I am doing that, could you please move your asses with something resembling urgency? Holding this door open is becoming a strain.”

  Pope and I had been walking through the Falcon’s cabin while I talked with Skippy, walking quickly as we could with the floor tilted and the ship still rocking from it precarious perch. Stepping onto the floor of the cavern, it felt weird. My expectation for a Maxolhx facility was something fancy, all shiny chrome and glass. Other than the trick ceiling, this place looked like a warehouse in any large city on Earth. “Um, Skippy, we’re in a cavern that was kept cold, dry and in low pressure. Why did the Maxolhx cover things with tarps?”

  “It does not make much sense to me either, Joe. My best guess is simple bureaucratic inertia. The facility technically was not abandoned, it was mothballed, put in reserve for possible future use. The procedure for placing a facility in reserve may call for placing protective covering over everything, whether the items are exposed to weather and dust or not.”

  Wiping my finger along a crate that had been knocked over by our sliding Falcon, I left a trail in the fine dust. “There is very little dust, considering how long this place has been here. I just can’t picture someone like that Mister Snuggles asshole setting down his lunchbox to throw tarps over all this stuff.”

  “That is funny,” the beer can chuckled. “Bots very likely did most or all of the work, Joe, I do not think the Maxolhx got their paws dirty with manual labor. The dropship you want is behind Door Number Three.”

  “Like that game show?”

  “No, the door is marked with the Maxolhx common language symbol for the number three, see?” Somehow, he altered the lighting to shine on a large corrugated door. Apparently, the Maxolhx symbol for three was three dots arranged vertically. Maybe they had done things Barney-style for future alien tomb raiders like us. Pope and I shrugged and broke into a trot as the door slid upward, along with the two doors to the left. In case you were wondering, the Maxolhx symbol for ‘one’ is a long vertical bar, the symbol for ‘two’ is two short vertical bars stacked one over the other. To the right was a fourth door, that symbol was the long vertical bar for ‘One’ next to the three dots of ‘Three’. Barney-style made it easy for me.

  “What’s next, Skippy?”

  “Pope should get into the dropship cockpit and begin the start-up sequence, I will walk him through it. You should go through Door Number One and I will show you which components need to be removed from that ship, to replace the worn-out parts of the ship we will be flying.”

  “We can start that ship before I swap out the busted parts?”

  “Yes, the start-up process is for power generation and avionics gear. The parts you will be replacing are for attitude control that is used only in flight. Speaking of attitude, I am pissed off about being used as a freakin’ doorstop, so get moving, monkeyboy.”

  Pope got the manual steps of the start-up taken care of, then he came out to help me while Skippy remotely continued bringing the dropship’s fusion reactor online. Working well as a team under Skippy’s very detailed directions, we got the required parts replaced and tested. “How long until this thing can fly, Skippy?” I asked as I closed the hatch covering the part we just replaced.

  “It is going slowly, these systems have not been used in hundreds of years. My best guess is twenty two minutes until power reaches the minimum safe level for sustained flight. Do you want me to entertain you with a story?”

  “No, I want you to tell us what other useful parts we should strip out of the two hangar queens, to keep our bird flying.”

  “Oh. That is good thinking, Joe. You should do that more often.”

  Seventeen minutes later, the cargo hold of our bird was littered with components we stripped off the other ships, all we could get in the short time available. The problem with the door had taken too long to resolve and we were way behind schedule, above us Simms had to be fretting at the delay. With more time and more people, we could have taken extra supplies from the other dropships, but we did not have more people and I wasn’t willing to risk us being down there any longer than we had to. Pope and I got into the cockpit and strapped in, fortunately the flight controls could be adjusted because both of us were shorter than a Maxolhx and when I first plo
pped my ass in the seat, I could barely see the holographic display in front of me. Even at maximum adjustment, Pope had trouble seeing the bottom of his display. It would have been awkward for me to suggest he sit on something like a booster seat, so I kept my mouth shut.

  The stupid power level meter was moving much too slowly, and there wasn’t anything we could do about it.

  “Aha!” Skippy exclaimed. “Got it. I understand now why the Maxolhx built this place, and why it had to be so deep under the surface. It also explains anomalies I found in the star’s behavior. Joe, those rotten kitties were testing their ability to manipulate stars, they must have tried to reverse-engineer Elder devices they used as weapons in their brief war against the Rindhalu.”

  “Whoa. The last time they used Elder weapons, they got their asses stomped by Sentinels. You’re telling me they are stupid enough to try it again?”

  “It’s not the same as last time, Joe. Before, they misused Elder devices for destructive purposes. This time, they are trying to make their own devices that are not as sophisticated or powerful, but are based on the same technology. If the Maxolhx can make a star go nova without relying on Elder devices, it is possible that the Sentinels might not interfere, I do not know their parameters.”

  “Did it work? The star is still here.”

  “The star is here and still functioning, however there are anomalies in its internal structure that remain long after the experiments were discontinued. From what I can tell based on the little evidence I was able to collect, the Maxolhx were surprisingly successful. This is a worrisome development, certainly it is not good for the Rindhalu or their client species. There is nothing to be concerned about in the short or even medium term, the Maxolhx merely demonstrated they understand the basic principles of how to collapse a star; they are far, far from being able to create an effect that could endanger a star. Although, hmm, running calculations here. I need to create a model and run a couple trillion variables through it. You two should, I don’t know, talk amongst yourselves or something.”