Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “I am millions of years old, dumdum, and I was sort of busted. Please, allow my bots to take the risk, that is what they are for.”

  “Ok,” I took another step back. Crap. If it were dangerous for me to touch the hull, was it dangerous to have my team anywhere near the thing? “Wait!” One of the bots had begun scurrying toward the featureless “Uh, maybe we should clear out of here first, us humans I mean.”

  “That might be a good idea. It would have been a great idea for you to think of it an hour ago, dumdum.”

  We cleared out of the area. To be safe, I flew the Falcon over the horizon and behind a ridge, flying it in lazy circles rather than setting it down. If we needed to get away in a hurry, I did not want to waste time powering up for takeoff. Also, I ordered the Dutchman to maneuver behind the moon, and to save time, Simms asked Nagatha to perform a short jump rather than flying the long way through normal space. “Ok, Skippy,” I watched a view from one of the bots in my helmet faceplate. “Do your thing. Uh, how are your bots getting in there? I still don’t see a door.”

  “Elder ships did not have anything crude like a door, Joe. Their hulls had sections of nanomaterial and fields where energy is held suspended temporarily in a material state, it is way too complicated for me to explain.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I sighed knowing the entire crew could hear me. “I’m a dumdum.”

  “Oh, it’s not just you, Joe. Your smartest supposed ‘scientists’ could not possibly fully understand the concepts of this energy/matter conversion. To break it down Barney-style for you, think of energy as water and matter as ice. Same thing in different states.”

  “Oh. Like, uh, smooth and crunchy peanut butter?” I guessed.

  That drew a heavy sigh from His Magnificence. “Yes, Joe, the peanut butter analogy is the absolute best way to explain it. If we ever meet the Rindhalu, you should impress them with your deep understanding of the subject.”

  “You don’t always have to be an asshole.”

  “I will stop being an asshole when you stop being a dumdum, deal? Anywho, I am about to request the hull to form an opening. Huh. Well, darn it, looks like nobody’s home. I’m not getting any response at all. You were right, Joe, this thing is dead as a doornail, the matter has reverted to a fully solid state. Hmm, even the nano appears to be inert. Crap! Once the nano has gone without power for that long, the tetronic bonds dissolve and- Ah, no point explaining this to you. We’ll have to do this the hard way.”

  I did not like the sound of that. “What, pray tell, is the hard way?”

  Before Skippy could answer, one of the bots that looked like a green toaster with a bunch of creepy legs and tentacles stepped toward the hull, pressing the tip of a tentacle to hull’s surface. A door then opened on the top of the toaster body and a second tentacle dipped inside, coming out with a nasty-looking thing I recognized as a sort of Thuranin cutting device that Skippy had modified to make even more effective. A light flared as the tip of the device approached the Elder ship’s hull. “This is the hard way, Joe,” he said as the little bot began cutting into the silvery hull material. “I know what you are thinking and don’t worry; this thing is truly inert. At least, the rear bulkhead is inert.”

  “You are sure that cutting torch,” the light was flaring really bright as the bot cut away a circle, “isn’t feeding energy into that nano stuff? That the nano isn’t going to come back to life and form up into a monster that will destroy those bots then come looking for us?”

  “Please,” he scoffed. “Little Joey watched too many bad sci fi movies. If there is a totally unexpected reaction, you will be first to know.”

  “Well, thank you so much for keeping me informed, Skippy. Your concern greatly warms my heart.”

  “Oh, I meant you will be first to know because your Falcon will be the first target, but let’s go with the heart-warming concern thing.”

  “Asshole,” I muttered, knowing the entire crew could hear that also and not caring.

  Nothing bad happened. In fact, several good things happened. The little bots cut a hole just big enough for the smaller of the two to slip inside, and we got a view of the cabin. That ship did not have a separate cockpit, the Elders apparently controlled the craft with their minds so no pilot console was needed. That explained why the body was in the second row of couches, with no one up front. When I asked what the Elders used as a backup in case their fancy brain-control thing failed, he snorted that the brain-control thing was the backup, that the primary control was an AI that responded to the wishes of the pilot. Then he relented and explained that Elder pilots had a secondary backup control in the form of a holographic sort of console that would appear on command in front of the pilot. In fact, he saw evidence that holographic mechanism had been activated just before the crash, in a last desperate attempt to avoid disaster. Clearly, it had not worked.

  Much of the hardware of the dropship was fried and useless, made of exotic materials that had reverted to their mundane original state over the millions of years the ship was buried. When the forward section of the ship had separated from the power module aft, the maneuver had been violent enough to break loose things inside the cabin, Skippy thought the Elder inside had sustained serious, possibly fatal injuries even before the forward section plunged down to impact the lunar mountain. Unlike what he originally thought, separation had not been an intentional act by the pilot. When the dropship was attacked, the explosion had caused the AI to dissolve the energy bonds that attached the forward section to the doomed power module, in a desperate and ultimately failed attempt to protect the pilot. When the ship smacked into the mountain, stuff that wasn’t already flying free inside the cabin broke loose, including several unoccupied seats. Before the AI ceased to function, it must have diverted all available power to a suspensor field around the pilot, cradling that being in an energy field that damped motion down to the cellular level. That precaution had not worked either. The super-tough material of the hull had survived mostly intact, with only the nose shattered and the first quarter of the hull crushed in like an accordion.

  Anyway, the inside of the cabin was a mess, with stuff thrown around and jumbled together at the side of the cabin that was on the bottom, when the tumbling dropship came to rest on the bottom of the mountain and got buried under the landslide caused by the impact.

  We, or technically Skippy’s helpful little elfbots, did find some cool useful stuff. The most important items were another comm node, a real zero-point energy power tap device, and what got me excited, another wormhole controller module to supplement the one we had been using since our first mission. Having the last two items gave me an idea to bail us out of our current predicament, but more about that later. You have probably been thinking ‘Bishop, cut the blah blah blah about minor crap you found and TELL ME ABOUT THAT ELDER PILOT’.

  Whew. Ok, got that. Yeah, when Skippy’s bots were crawling around in their creepy insect-like way, examining the cabin and stuff we could see laying in a jumbled pile, I was shouting at him to turn his attention to the barely-seen form of something, or someone, in that second-row couch. He was reluctant to show us the body and I understood his feelings, he did not want filthy curious monkeys idly gawking at the broken body of a supreme being with our unworthy eyeballs. It’s like why police cover bodies with a sheet, to respect the dead and prevent onlookers from satisfying their gruesome curiosity. It took a lot of talking for me to convince him that we needed to finally know what an Elder looked like.

  Ok, so he turned one of the bots to focus on the Elder. Before he stunned us with the revelation that the crashed dropship contained a body of the ultimate senior species, I had not recently given a lot of thought about what the Elders might look like. When we were on Gingerbread, I kept hoping to find at least bones, or a statue or even an outline carved into a rock. At that point, I would have been happy with a crude drawing of an Elder on a bathroom door with a sign like ‘Garmegell eats chootah’.

  We did not find any amusi
ng signs scrawled on the bathroom door of the dropship, in fact the little craft did not have any sort of washroom or galley that Skippy could detect. So, we had to satisfy ourselves with seeing the broken body of an Elder.

  Whatever I thought an Elder would look like, the reality was different. From old sci fi movies, I had a notion that the more advanced a being was, the more it would look like little green dudes like the Thuranin, or the creepy humans with giant heads who worshipped atomic bombs in one of those Planet of the Apes movies. As beings became more advanced and less reliant on physical size and strength, they would become smaller and softer.

  What we saw was not like that. This Elder was eight feet tall and heavily muscled. Its head had a bony crest with backward-pointing spikes, its fingers ended in long claws, and its snout was long and full of sharp teeth. The snout wasn’t real long like a crocodile, more like a dog, but overall the thing was vaguely reptilian. The Elders kind of looked like what the Kristang might like to evolve into someday.

  “Holy shit, Skippy,” I said when I was able to stop holding my breath from shock. “That thing, I mean, that Elder, looks like a gladiator. Were they all like that?” I asked, thinking maybe there were multiple types of Elder, and the one we found had been genetically modified for military service. If so, it might not have needed a power-assisted mech suit, its muscles looked like they would be enough for super feats of strength and speed. “Oh, sorry, that was a dumb question. You don’t have any other Elders for comparison.”

  “It was a dumb question, Joe,” he replied in the hushed tone he had been using since his bots entered what he considered the holy presence of an Elder, even a dead one. “However, I have enough information from a DNA scan to determine that yes, what we are seeing is the base configuration of an Elder.”

  “Uh, base configuration?” When he said that, I had a mental image of an Elder that could remove its arms to plug in custom attachments, like weapons or a weedwhacker. That image almost made me laugh, which would have greatly offended Skippy, so fortunately I bit the inside of my cheek to stifle my mirth.

  “Elder biology does not utilize DNA the way humans think of the term, however they do have complex chemical strands that determine how their bodies process energy and grow. Their DNA-equivalent could be modified by interaction with nanoscale implants, at the user’s desire or requirement.”

  “Whoa,” that blew my mind. “They can, like, make their arms longer to reach something on a shelf above their heads?”

  “It doesn’t work that quickly, dumdum,” he dropped the reverent hushed voice and went into full-snarky mode when disparaging my intelligence. “Duh. For example, if an Elder were to visit a heavy-gravity planet, it could adjust its DNA ahead of time to grow stronger bones and muscles. Or it could, I guess, grow gills to breath underwater.”

  “Wow. Muscles and bones stronger than what that thing- Sorry, that person, already has?”

  “Correct, Joe. The biological bones of that Elder are merely a framework for a much more robust composite structure. If it were not for the reinforced structure of his body, I suspect that even with the suspensor field, the body would be in many small pieces.”

  “Uh, him? That’s a he, a guy?”

  “Yes, a male. Elder biology was based on gender binarism, in the strictly reproductive sense of the word ‘gender’. I can tell you that, based on my analysis of this body’s biochemistry, their females apparently were the same size and basic configuration.”

  “I would not like to meet either of them in a dark alley,” my shoulders shuddered involuntarily. Those claws, dulled by extreme age, still looked like they could slice me open. “His body is well-preserved,” I noted.

  “It is. The cabin was exposed to partial vacuum, and the nanomachines woven into his biology have largely prevented decay. Joe,” his voice switched from my helmet speakers to the earpiece, indicating he was speaking on a private channel. “Please tell me your intentions regarding this Elder.”

  “You mean, do I want to bring him aboard the Dutchman?” My mind had been racing on that subject, trying to judge the alternatives. “No, I do not. Skippy, I think we take the stuff that you think is useful, then your bots seal that hole and we leave him there in peace.”

  “Thank you, Joe,” he said with almost a sob. “You are a good person, I am proud to be your friend. It would have bothered me greatly to bring the victim of this crash back to Earth for curious humans to gawk at him.”

  “I agree.” Part of my reason for leaving the body there was because I thought seeing it would cause panic on Earth. Plus, if authorities on Earth really wanted to closely examine the corpse, they would have to send the Flying Dutchman back out. “Going back to Earth is a long way off, we still need to stop those Maxolhx ships. That dropship doesn’t have any weapons we could use?”

  “It does not contain anything like a weapon at all, sorry.”

  “All right. Wrap it up at your convenience, Ok?” If Skippy wanted a moment alone with the body, through his little bots, I wanted to give him all the time he needed.

  “Thank you, but I’m good, Joe,” his tone was a bit louder and reflected his disappointment. “We have found everything there is to find here.”

  “Hey, we found more than we expected. A lot more.”

  “Eh, sure, I guess. We already have a wormhole controller module, and all the comm nodes we’ve found so far have been inactive.”

  “We now have a spare wormhole controller, and a super-duper Elder battery thing. Plus, you don’t know this comm node is inactive. Maybe this one is working just fine.”

  The comm node was, like the others we had found, inactive. Or it was unable to connect to the network, or the network was down, or Skippy didn’t know how to use it. To spare his feelings, I refrained from asking whether maybe he was talking into the wrong end of the thing, or maybe it needed to be plugged in. Or if there was an instruction manual lying around somewhere. Best would be a YouTube video where an Elder shows how to properly use a communications node, but that is too much to ask for.

  The comm node was bad news but that was no big deal, we had stolen or found inactive comm nodes before and Skippy had not been looking for one, so he was not disappointed when our latest acquisition wasn’t functional.

  The other two items got me very excited. “Skippy, the wormhole controller works Ok, you’re sure?”

  “I can’t be absolutely one hundred percent sure until I try to monkey with a wormhole again, which if you remember, is what got us into this mess.”

  “I do remember.” Why do people like to remind you of stuff you already know, that they know you know, especially when the thing they are reminding you about is one of your major screw-ups? “How confident are you that it works properly?”

  “Oh, supremely confident. I have connected to it through high spacetime, and it responded perfectly. Um, Joe, there is something we should talk about.”

  “Can it wait like, ten minutes? I have to secure the Falcon.” The dropship was in its docking cradle but there were a lot of steps I needed to perform to make sure it was shut down properly and ready for the next flight.

  “No, it can’t wait, and don’t bother shutting down. In fact, send someone to my mancave to get me, we need to go on a road trip.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN

  The road trip was for me and Skippy, no one else. With our crew barely large enough for the mission, I didn’t want to risk additional people. Skippy had suggested we put him in the Falcon and remotely pilot it for him, but he also suggested the Dutchman jump away to be safe, so the signal lag would be too great for effective remote piloting of the Falcon. Plus, he did not know what he would find out there, and wanted my monkey brain with him in case he encountered something dangerous.

  I was touched by his concern for me.

  The road trip was not an epic long weekend, it involved only a three-hour flight in the Falcon, although I had to endure sustained four-Gee thrust to get moving, then three times Earth’s gravity
to slow down near the target. What was the target? Skippy did not know, or he wasn’t sure. He thought it could be an active comm node, because something out there had a connection to higher spacetime and the obvious candidate, given the weakness of the connection, was an Elder communications node on standby, or operating at low power. The Dutchman’s sensors had not detected anything, which annoyed Nagatha and threw her into a funk because she had not been kept in the loop by Skippy.

  The beer can explained that he had been concentrating his attention on the moon and only gave surrounding space a cursory scan, until he picked up something unusual. Scattered debris from another Elder starship, this one in an elliptical orbit that took it far from the moon. At first, even the discovery of a third Elder ship did not spark his curiosity into overdrive, he already knew there had been a battle in the area and the exact number of ships involved was not very important.

  Then he did look more closely at the third ship, or actually one of his subminds got bored with composing songs to mock the great Skippy, and decided to look at the data. What it found did get Skippy’s full attention.

  “Joe, that third ship was Elder tech of a different design, slightly more advanced. The technology is merely an interesting datapoint and I would eventually have archived it, but I found another anomaly. The third ship was destroyed much later, much more recently. Like, around the time that Newark was thrown out of orbit.”

  “Oh shit.”

  “Yup, that’s what I said.”

  “There were two space battles here, both involving Elder ships?”

  “Apparently, yes. Battles many millions of years apart. Another fun fact, if you are interested, is some of the damage to that Elder site happened around the time the third ship was destroyed. It looks like someone came back a long time later to finish the job of erasing evidence of the Elder presence in this star system.”