Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)

by Craig Alanson

  “This signal of whatever you’re tracking, it is from wreckage of the Elder third ship?”

  “I think so, because the object is in a similar elliptical orbit.”

  “Just the one object? You didn’t find any big pieces of the third ship, something we might be able to use?”

  “No, destruction of that ship was violent and complete. To be honest, I am not detecting an object at all. What I do know is something out there has an active connection to higher spacetime. The connection is weak and intermittent, that leads me to believe that comm node is damaged.”

  “Comm node or whatever else it is. You don’t know it’s a comm node for sure.”

  “True, however, I do not know what else it could be.”

  Given Skippy’s inability to think outside the box, I was not comforted by his not being able to imagine what could be out there. “Ah, hell, we’ll find out in,” I checked the console, “forty two minutes.”

  I was wrong about the forty two minute timeline. Not wrong about the navigation, I had no illusion about being a great pilot but plotting a course to where Skippy wanted to go in empty space was fairly simple math, even for me. To get to the object quickly, I planned a three Gee deceleration to bring us to a halt relative to the unseen object at a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers, a nice round number that Skippy thought would be super conservative for safety. Once we were stationary relative to whatever it was, Skippy would scan it with his own sensors, then I could move us closer slowly and carefully. The only possible problem would be the Falcon’s engines cutting out before we finished cancelling our velocity, leaving us to go shooting past the thing.

  That is sort of what happened, the Falcon’s engines did cut off prematurely when we were nineteen thousand kilometers from where I wanted to stop. Except I did not screw up, nor was there a mechanical problem with our Thuranin dropship.

  “Huh, that’s weird,” Skippy muttered.

  My focus was on the instruments and on breathing deep and even to counteract the extra weight on my chest from the deceleration. “Weird is not good,” I grunted in a hoarse voice. “What is it?” My left index finger hovered over a button that would engage an abort course, flipping the Falcon ninety degrees and going to eight Gees to get us out of there.

  “It looks like you were right, it is not a communications node. It must be some type of equipment that survived destruction of the ship, something that- ick app thow ger unn too gann-” he continued stuttering nonsense like that, his voice cutting in and out. With my helmet sealed, he was talking through my earpiece and I shook my head, wondering if the creepy like spider thing had fallen out.

  “Skippy, you’re breaking up.” I expected he would complain about how stupid and clumsy monkeys are. “What did you say?”

  “GET OUT OF HERE!” He shouted clearly and my finger flexed to engage the abort course-

  A choking sensation woke me up, that and needing to sneeze. When I opened my eyes, I almost wished I hadn’t, I was tumbling head over heels so fast the starfield was going by with nausea-inducing speed. A feature of Kristang flightsuit faceplates is they go clear when power is cut off, and my suit was completely dead. Which was why I felt like I was suffocating, I was suffocating. The oxygen recycler was offline, along with everything else.

  Where the hell was the Falcon? I remember being in the left-hand pilot couch of a Falcon and Skippy shouting a warning, then nothing. Ok, first I manually got the emergency oxygen supply started and in moments, blessedly sweet, clean oxygen was blowing from a vent in my helmet. Taking a deep breath made me sneeze, an unfortunate event because the static field inside the faceplate was offline. Also, with a helmet on I could not squeeze my nose or do anything other than scrunch up my lip to suppress another sneeze. It worked well enough.

  “Skippy?” I called. There was no answer. “Skippy?” I called out louder, as if that would help in space. Even with the flightsuit dead, I should be able to hear him through my earpiece. Except, what was that thing bouncing off the upper right corner of the faceplate? Crap, it was the earpiece. It must have come loose and floated out of my ear. That should not ever happen, the thing must be dead. What the hell was going on?

  Then I got another shock. Something was banging against my waist and shoulders. Feeling around with the non-powered arms of my suit, I realized I was still strapped into the pilot couch, or part of the pilot couch. The straps were fancy nanotech fibers that adjusted automatically, the also had a manual release mechanism that I fumbled with until I got the straps loose. The broken couch floated away, giving me a glimpse of it as I flipped head over heels. It was not only broken, to me it appeared to have been severed cleanly from the Falcon, sliced away by something. Had the Dutchman’s crew cut the couch away from the dropship to rescue me? If so, where were they and why was I tumbling out of control in a dead flightsuit? And where was the rest of the Dragon?

  Most importantly, where was Skippy?

  Without any sort of clock, I had no idea how much time had passed since I turned on the emergency oxygen flow. Spinning so rapidly made blood pool in my head, giving me a headache and making me dizzy. It was a toss-up which would make me more nauseous; keeping my eyes closed so my inner ears had no frame of reference, or opening my eyes and watching the stars spin past. Whatever happened, I could not get sick in my helmet or I would risk clogging the air vents. Since first going into zero gravity aboard a Kristang troop transport at the space elevator above Ecuador, I had gotten space sick three times, none of those incidents were recent. NASA astronauts sometimes got over initial space sickness, but sometimes people who had completed several space missions could suddenly be stricken by nausea in zero gravity. Fortunately, I had eaten a small and bland breakfast of oatmeal and toast, partly because I had been nervous about going down to the Elder site and partly because I was too lazy to make anything else.

  By flashing my eyes open and shut quickly, I determined nothing had changed. The local star was still flashing past regularly as I tumbled, fortunately the star was off to my left and not shining directly into my eyes. That would have been-

  Wait. Something was different. There was another star out there, a bright one.

  And it was getting closer.

  Trying to watch had me on the verge of ralphing in my helmet, so I shut my eyes and waited. If the approaching bright object was hostile, there was nothing I could do about it. Part of me was hoping the light was a missile, because a quick death was preferable to what would happen when my oxygen ran out.

  Something slammed into me and my arms were encased in a vice-like grip. Instinctively I tried to flail my arms but in an unpowered suit there was no chance I could break away.

  “I got you I got you I got you,” a muffled voice announced through helmet to helmet contact.

  “Poole?” I was so relieved I opened my eyes and regretted it, with Poole’s mass attached to my own, we were now wobbling about all three axes and my brain was rattling in my skull. “Is that you?”

  “Yes,” her voice was strained. She must be struggling with nausea like I was. “Relax, Sir.”

  The light I had seen was Captain Poole in a jetpack, coming to latch onto me. I got the full story from Skippy later, after Poole got me aboard a dropship and we flew off to recover Skippy. It took both of us a while to recover from having our brains tossed, around as the jetpack worked to stabilize our wild tumbling. Holding his beer can in my hands, I was surprised to see a slight discoloration of his previous uniformly shiny silver surface. “Skippy,” I strapped him securely to a seat and gave Porter and Edwards the signal to fly us back to the Dutchman. “What the hell was that?”

  “It was an AI, Joe. I’m sorry.”

  “An AI?” When I heard ‘AI’ I immediately thought of the artificial intelligences at the Bosphuraq moonbase, in the Maxolhx relay station and in the pixie factory. “Oh,” I gasped when realization hit me.

  “Yeah, an Elder AI.”

  “Like you?”

  “Clo
se enough. Sorry, Joe, I screwed up. It never crossed my mind that signal I detected was the local spacetime connection of an AI like me. My connection is much stronger, like orders of magnitude stronger, and also much quieter. If that AI had been fully functional like me, I could not have detected it unless it shouted and waved its arms.”

  “Had been functional?”

  “It’s gone now. Wait, no one briefed you on what happened?”

  “No, Skippy,” I shook my head and regretted that action. “I have a massive headache. Plus when I got aboard the dropship, I couldn’t help ralphing.” Poole had actually beat me to the Falcon’s tiny bathroom to puke in the proper receptacle, I used my helmet. Then I passed out, being revived only to lose what was left in my stomach.

  “We thought you were dead, Sir,” Poole explained, rubbing her very pale face with a towel. “The explosion, it was like a tactical nuke.”

  “Not quite,” Skippy corrected. “But it was a massive explosion, that is true.”

  “Could someone please explain what happened?” I pleaded. “Where is the Falcon I was flying?”

  “The Falcon is gone, Joe. That AI was insane, Joe, damaged and insane. Also, it was not self-aware, and I think that unlike me, it was never sapient, or ‘sentient’ if you prefer that term. It attacked without warning as soon as we were within its effective radius, and I was totally unprepared. Most of the energy thrown at us was absorbed by me and channeled into another spacetime, but the Falcon’s mass was converted to subatomic particles. You are alive because I created a spacetime bubble around us to protect you. Then I had to release you so I could fight back. That AI used tactics and capabilities I did not know were possible, I still do not understand most of the technology it employed against us. Against me, really, you and the Falcon were collateral damage.”

  “Hey, uh, thanks for saving my life. You know, again.”

  “You are very welcome.” He missed a golden opportunity to boast about himself, that told me more than his words did about how shaken up he was. “My fault for poking my nose into dark scary places.”

  “You said this AI was insane? You think that, because it attacked you?”

  “No. The attack implies hostility, not insanity. It was babbling, Joe, completely incoherent. The attack was also incoherent, it could have destroyed me right away but the energies and spacetime distortions it used were unfocused and it seemed to lose track of me, or forget about me, halfway through. That AI was totally bonkers, Joe. Its poor control over itself allowed me to recover, protect myself and you, and consolidate my own resources to strike back. The whole incident took less than two seconds in meatsack time, an eternity in my time.”

  “How did you beat it?”

  “At first, I tried to activate the computer worm that I found inside it, although that was desperation on my part. The worm should have killed that thing back when it went insane, so I did not have high hopes for Mister Wormy to come to my rescue. There was no response. Either the worm was also damaged, or the corrupted matrix of the AI rendered it immune to the worm. Anyway, while the AI forgot about me and was randomly creating rips in spacetime, I was able to feed part of its energy back on itself, and, well, I kinda made it destroy itself. That was the explosion, it lost containment.”

  Hearing that disappointed and confused me. “It lost containment, with less force than a tactical nuke?”

  “Ah, you are thinking loss of containment should have been a planet-shattering event? That would be true if the AI had been near a planet or moon. It lost containment in empty space, so there was little mass in the area to convert into energy. Also, its connection to higher spacetime was already weak and tenuous, so only a minor part of the AI’s true self came through the connection. Our presence here in local spacetime is mostly sort of an anchor so we can act effectively here, Joe. By ‘our’ I mean AIs like me.”

  “Yeah, I got that. Hell, Skippy, what do we do now?”

  “I recommend we make like a shepherd and get the flock out of here,” he declared without a trace of humor.

  “Working on it, Sir,” Edwards reported from the copilot seat. “ETA at the Dutchman is fifteen minutes.”

  It had taken me three hours to fly from the ship to where the insane AI attacked, but now we could get back in less than half an hour? “That’s quick,” I remarked.

  “Colonel Simms jumped the ship in soon as we received Skippy’s signal,” Porter explained from the pilot’s seat. “Most of the delay in rendezvousing with you was because the explosion blew you backwards at seventeen thousand kph,” he shook his head. “I don’t know how it didn’t kill you.”

  “I had a beer can looking out for me,” I shuddered involuntarily. When we got back to the ship, I was going to need sleep, and I wasn’t getting it until the ship had safely jumped away.

  Skippy takes things way too literally sometimes. After being treated for my injuries by Mad Doctor Skippy, I was still sleeping at 0900 Hours when I was awakened by a commotion in the passageway outside my door, and by my zPhone beeping with a message from Simms. You need to see this, the message read. I instantly shot out of bed, whacking my head on the overhead cabinet for the thousandth freakin’ time. As I rubbed my head and swung my feet to the floor, I noticed Simms had added a winking emoji to the end of her message. What the hell?

  Dressing quickly, I got a shirt, pants and boots on and slapped the button to open the door. Before I saw the source of the commotion, I heard it. Whether it was intentional or not, the voice sounded like it was talking over one of those tinny, low-fidelity speakers you hear at summer camp or in a big store, because it was like someone talking from the bottom of a well. “Vote for Skippy! Skippy means progress! A vote for Skippy is a vote for success!”

  Then it came around a corner and got louder. It was a familiar bot that rolled on treads, a bot I had seen performing cleaning or routine maintenance chores around the ship. On top, instead of cleaning attachments, were two speakers and a big poster of Lord Admiral Skippy, smiling and looking calm and confident. “S-K-I-P-P-Y stands for Success! Kindness! Integrity! Prosperity! And, um, something else that starts with the letter ‘P’. Crap, um, Progress! Yeah, Progress! And the ‘Y’ is for Yes We Can! Vote for Skip-”

  “Skippy,” I stood in front of the bot, waving my arms and forcing it to grind to a halt. “What the hell is this?”

  His avatar appeared, floating in the air at my eye level. “Joe, it would violate my well-known and documented integrity to speak with my opponent outside of a scheduled debate. Please save your questions for-”

  “Doc-documented? Your integrity? You are talking about the Skippy who screws with us just for amusement?”

  “Exactly, Joe. People know I am an asshole, so when I act like an asshole, I am acting with the integrity people expect.”

  “You get a pass for being an asshole,” I spoke slowly because my brain was processing his statement, “because you admit you’re an asshole?”

  “Egg-zactly. I don’t make the social rules you monkeys follow, Joe, I just take advantage of them for my benefit. I mean,” he waved a hand. “I mean, I adhere to social conventions. Or some bullshit like that. Whatever. See, you pretend to be a super nice guy, so when you do anything even remotely not perfect, people say ‘Aha! I knew he was a phony jerk’. I am much more honest, because I tell people up front that I think your entire species is a woefully underdeveloped ignorant collection of disorganized chemicals, and people love me.”

  “I, I actually cannot argue with you about that.”

  “Joe, to be fair, we really should wait for the debate before we talk.”

  “De- debate? What debate? What is this? You are running for election as what? Supreme Asshole?”

  “No, Joe. Please, try to keep up with current events, huh? I am running for your job, you know, captain of the ship, commander of the mission, all that.”

  “Uh, what? This is not a democrac- Oh, shit.” Damn it, just then I remembered telling the beer can that pirate ship crew
s often used to choose their officers. “Skippy, I did not mean that thing about pirate democracy literally.”

  “Why not?” He asked like a toddler who had been told he can’t have ice cream for breakfast. “Does your authority to command this mission come from UNEF?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “From the United Nations at all? No?” He answered for me. “How about the United States Army? Did they authorize you to lead this mission, this vitally important mission, which so far has been a disorganized, chaotic mess?”

  “You know the answer to that question, Skippy.”

  “I do know the answer, and the crew knows the answer. We are pirates, and the crew has the right to choose their leaders.”

  “Uh huh. The answer is to put a beer can in charge of making decisions?”

  “Come on, Joe, seriously, could I do any worse than you? We have taken enormous risks already, and still you have no idea how we can stop two Maxolhx ships from reaching Earth. This whole mission has been a screw-up, right from the start.”

  “Uh, yes. Most of the screw-ups were caused by you. At the moonbase, you failed to account for that fighter patrol taking off from the moonbase, though you should have known about it from hacking into their comm system. You didn’t know the crawler was taking a different route, that is another thing that must have been listed in a database you had access to. You should have known that Smythe’s team would make the crawler too heavy to travel its route. You for damned sure should have known power was cut to part of the base. And don’t even get me started about your major screw-ups at the pixie factory, and for nearly getting us killed by an Elder AI. That’s just the beginning of-”

  “Ugh, what I hear is ‘blah blah blah Joe is looking for someone to blame’. Oh, this is so sad. Listen, dumdum, I will admit that some minor mistakes were made, if you will admit all the screw-ups happened on your watch. You know how absent-minded I allegedly am-”