SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (14 page)

"Oh. Ready now."

"Jump those ships into hell, Skippy."

"Done. Enhanced image in main display."

On the display, the two destroyers flared into
existence within the gas giant planet's upper atmosphere. Immediately, their
hulls began glowing hot pink as they fell rapidly down, down, down toward the
planet's core. Pieces began breaking off the ships, the larger pieces tumbling
and spinning away. Quickly, we lost sight of the ships, even in the enhanced
image, as they were swallowed up the poisonous atmosphere. I held up my right
hand and, flipped the bird to the image on the display. "Adios, MFers,"
I said quietly.

"Joe," Skippy said, "you surprised me.
That was spiteful of you."

"Skippy, you know me as the doofus who jokes
around with you. I am that, you need to understand that is only part of who I
am. Right now, first, I am a soldier, I'm going to defend my ship, my crew and
my species, above all else. Including getting a small measure of revenge once
in a while."

"Got it. Especially since you acknowledged that
you are a doofus."

That remark managed to draw a smile from my lips, as I
watched the last pieces of the two destroyers disappear into the roiling
clouds. "I wouldn't have it any other way. People, let's retrieve our
landing party, before some other group of assholes show up here and spoil the
party. Major Simms, signal Captain Desai to proceed to the main site, and for
Colonel Chang to get his team moving toward the evac site. They can drop
communications silence; I want a status report ASAP." Their heavily
encrypted transmissions would not reveal the presence of humans in the star
system. "Skippy, program a jump to take us over to that moon,
please."

Desai responded almost immediately after we jumped in
near the moon again. "
Dutchman
, we are off the ground, ETA at the
main site is four minutes," she said, which meant she was really pushing
the dropship's speed, we could hear the strain in her voice. "What
happened up there?"

"A Kristang task force jumped in uninvited,
apparently the planet is a popular refueling station, they must have the only
clean bathrooms in this part of the galaxy."

"I find that hard to believe, sir," Desai
laughed.

"That the planet is a gas station?" I asked,
confused.

"No, that any gas station has clean
bathrooms."

"Oh!" She made me laugh. Damn, she had been
trapped on the moon's surface, out of communication, worried sick about the
people stuck in their slowly-suffocating space suits, and still she had the
good spirits to make me laugh. "You are probably right about that,
Captain," I replied. "There were seven Kristang ships in the task
force, four of them jumped away, to hitch a ride on a Thuranin star
carrier."

"And the rest?"

"Scratch two destroyers and one
battlecruiser."

"Roger that,
Dutchman
, I'd love to hear
the details later. Any damage to my ship?" She understandably had referred
to the
Flying
Dutchman
as 'her' ship. I didn't mind at all, she
had been flying the darned thing, I had only been giving orders.

"No damage, we didn't even fire a shot."

"Wow. Now I
have
to hear about this."

Lt. Colonel Chang had been even more happy to hear
from us, and especially from Desai. She landed the big dropship as close as
possible to the entrance to the underground building where Chang and his team
had spent over a day hiding, waiting, waiting for rescue or for their oxygen to
run out. As soon as the dropship was secured in the landing bay, I ordered a
long jump, to get us far away from that star system. As a courtesy, I waited
for Chang to get out of his no doubt stinking space suit, take a shower, drink
a half gallon of water and grab a simple lunch before he gave me a briefing.
"We're all fine now, Colonel," he reported while eating the last
spoonful of soup, "those soldiers are all admirably disciplined. When we
got your signal, I ordered them to lay down, rest and conserve oxygen, and
that's what they did. No complaining, no talking. Mostly, we tried to sleep a
lot, we kept one person awake at all times to listen for your signal. Other
than watching our oxygen gauges move toward zero, and wondering what was going
on upstairs, it was boring more than anything else."

"Your people were down in an access shaft?"
I asked.

"Yes, we found an area of the site that appeared
to not have been looted, there was no sign anyone had ever been there for a
very long time, thick dust on the floor, no footprints. The entrance to the
area was hidden, we found it by luck. It led to an access shaft, I sent four
people down it, they got to the bottom and there was a corridor." He
finished the last of the soup and pushed the bowl aside. "It was a dead
end, appears to be maintenance access for the life support system. We didn't
find anything useful down there."

"It was worth a shot, good call," I assured
him, "you had no way to know we were about to have uninvited guests."

Chang nodded slowly. "In the future, we need to
bring some sort of portable shelter that has oxygen, so we don't rely only on
the suits."

"Agreed, we don't have anything like that aboard,
we'll need to see if we can rig something up. We also, in the future, need to
keep the landing party in one place, with a dropship nearby. If we're going to
split up a landing party, we need multiple dropships," I concluded. That
was a mild criticism, a lesson learned. There were a whole lot of lessons to be
learned out here, for all of us.

Including Skippy. After talking to Chang, and seeing
that the eleven others were doing well and eager to continue the mission, I
went to my cubbyhole of an office, to get started on writing up an after-action
report while it was fresh in my mind. "That was a waste of time,"
Skippy said bitterly, just as I sat down in my uncomfortable chair. "All
that way, only to find an Elder site that has already been looted."

"It was not a waste of time, we already discussed
this," I reminded him. "We proved your method of predicting unknown
Elder sites is correct."

"Yeah, except this one wasn't unknown, it was
located at a freakin' highway rest stop. There should have been a big glowing
sign, like 'Big Mike's Truck Stop, low prices, great food, don't miss our Elder
site attraction, get a free T-shirt'."

"Yeah, about that. Why wasn't that moon on your
list of confirmed Elder sites, since everybody else in the whole galaxy knows
about it?"

"Oh, uh, hmm. Maybe it was on my map, in
retrospect. That may have been a teensy weensy screw up, on my part. Nothing
worth mentioning."

"Nothing worth mentioning, you say? Skippy, you
sent us into a star system that is a super highway of interstellar traffic. The
only way that place could have more traffic, is if that Elder site was giving
away free beer, or whatever the Kristang drink. And you told us the place was
deserted, it has an unimpressive star, and no habitable planet. We almost had a
landing party suffocate, because of your teensy weensy screw up. Please,
indulge me, mention it."

"Oh, yeah, sure, blame me," he said
defensively, "I had to process exabytes of pirated data to create my map,
so excuse me if the final result needed some fine tuning. Now that I have that
system as a data point, I know that Elder site was indeed on the map, it was
mentioned in a side note. My assumption was that an Elder site would be
featured prominently in any data about a star system, and that is true about
all the other sites I was looking at. This particular site is a side note,
precisely because it is so well known. Now that I know how such places are
tagged in databases, I have identified six other similar sites, none of which
are on our target list. More importantly, I have confirmed that the other,
unknown, potential Elder sites on our list truly are not known to other
spacefaring species."

"Unless an Elder site is known, and isn't in any
database you have access to, because the species that knows about it wants to
keep it secret."

"That is always a possibility, Joe," he said
glumly, "nothing I can do about that. You're right, it was not a waste of
time, it was, however, very disappointing. Now I have to wait, again, while we
travel through empty space."

I tried to cheer him up. "Hey, you have been
waiting a long time, what's another couple days?"

"The next target is ten days from here. That's
more than a couple days, Joe."

"Less than two weeks!" I tried to be cheery
about it.

"Two weeks in a barrel of monkeys," he said,
"somebody, please, shoot me."

Skippy was wrong, there was something we could do to
avoid jumping into star systems that had, permanently or frequently, an alien
presence. From now on, I determined, the
Flower
would be jumping in
first, to recon the place, before we jumped the
Dutchman
in and launched
a landing party. According to Skippy, sending our captured Kristang frigate in
was a waste of effort, that ship's sensors were so pitifully inadequate that it
could barely find a planet. I disagreed, and figured he was exaggerating. When
we were near the second target, we held the
Dutchman
at the edge of the
star system, and Colonel Chang took the
Flower
in. He was gone a total
of twelve hours, twelve hours that were nerve-wracking hours for me. The
Flower
jumped back exactly on time, and Chang excitedly reported what they had found,
Or, rather, what they had not found.

In terms of finding Skippy's magical radio, the second
of Skippy’s potential Elder sites was another disappointment. In terms of
sparking the interest of Skippy and our science team, of the entire merry band
of pirates, it was a big score. A home run. A touchdown. Or in soccer it would
be a Goooooooal! The star, if you could call it that, was another dim red
dwarf, a type of star I was getting jaded about already. There was no sign this
star system had ever been visited by an intelligent species, other than the
Elders. The place was so boring and ordinary, there was no reason for anyone to
be here, unless they thought they'd find an Elder site, like we had. We found
an Elder site, on a small airless moon orbiting a gas giant, right where Skippy
thought it would be. From what we could tell, no one had found this site before
us, no one had stripped it of valuables. The site had lain untouched for
millions of years.

What was left of the site, anyway. What Skippy found
intriguing, mostly because he didn't understand it, was that the center of the
site had disappeared, been scooped out millions of years ago. Scooped out
surgically. Where the center of the site used to be, where all the important
Elder facilities were, was an almost perfect half circle, gouged out of the
moon. Over the eons, the edges of the circle had crumbled somewhat, and the
bowl had small craters scarring its bottom from later meteor impacts. Even to
my unscientific eyes, something strange had happened here.

Skippy took an unusually long time processing the
sensor data. "We should go down there anyway, I want to get samples,"
he finally said, after what for him must have been a lifetime of analysis.
"There may be something useful in the outbuildings, I doubt it, but since
we're here, we should check it out. Joe, I do not understand what happened
here. Or, I do understand what happened here, I don't understand
why
.
This is Elder technology, they created a spherical field, that moved everything
inside that field into another spacetime. This is somewhat advanced technology,
very energy-intensive, even for the Elders. Why they would have done this, to
one of their own facilities, I have no idea. We need answers.
I
need
answers."

This time, I went down to the moon in the dropship,
and Chang remained aboard the
Dutchman
. With me were the French team,
they had missed out, if you could call it that, on landing at the first Elder site.
Giraud got the honor of first boot on the ground. I was right behind him,
walking gingerly in the one-ninth gravity of the small moon, taking care with
every step not to launch myself a hundred feet off the surface. Between the low
gravity, and the boosted power of the armor suit, that would have been all too
easy to do. The suits had settings for low gravity, preventing an unwary,
foolish, inexperienced or merely stupid wearer from doing anything that might
be fatal, those settings could be overridden in combat. Like all the other
soldiers, I was eager to test a suit in simulated combat, especially in low
gravity.

We poked around the site for a couple hours, looking
into mostly empty structures, and didn't find anything useful. Naturally, I
couldn't resist going right up to the edge of the perfect half sphere that had
been scooped out of the moon. The lip of the sphere had crumbled somewhat over
the eons, although in some places, where the sphere had cut through hard rock,
the edge was still well defined. Standing there, listening to the gentle
hissing of air in my stolen alien spacesuit, looking up at the vastness of
star-spangled pitch black space above, then down at the chilling mystery of the
half-sphere of moon that had been sent into another spacetime, I felt small.
Small, insignificant, utterly unimportant to the cold universe. I felt, more
than ever, that humans had no place out here, among the stars, so far from
home. All our problems, our hopes, our dreams, our fears of being conquered,
enslaved or wiped out by a technologically superior species, none of that meant
anything to the ancient, unfeeling universe. With a shudder, I stepped back
from the lip of the sphere, and turned to walk back to the dropship.

And I smiled. To my right, a group of French
paratroopers were standing at the lip of the sphere, getting their pictures
taken. After one or two serious poses appropriate for the significance of the
site, they were showing off for the camera; doing handstands, forming a pyramid
with one soldier on the shoulders of two others.

Screw the universe. The universe didn't care about us
monkeys, it didn't need to. We could manage fine on our own, and even have a
bit of fun doing it. We were going to be all right, if we had each other.

 Relenting to pressure from the science team, who had
mostly been stuck on the ship, I let a half dozen of them go down to the
surface, accompanied by Indian paratroopers. When the scientists concluded with
bitter disappointment, after several hours, that there was nothing of value or
even interest at the site, they came back to the
Dutchman
. I ordered
course set for the next target, and we jumped away.

The next day, I made the mistake of saying 'hello' to
people as I came into the gym. All I wanted to do was run on the treadmill to
warm up, before running down the ship's long spine. One of our SEALs took my
greeting as an invitation to talk, and he hopped on the adjacent treadmill for
what I quickly learned was an uncomfortable conversation.

Cutting short my warm-up, I wiped my face with a
towel. "I will talk to Skippy about it," I assured him.

"I appreciate it, sir," he said, and sped up
his treadmill as I walked out the door.

I ran a series of hard sprints, and thought about how
to raise the subject while I cooled down on the walk back to the front of the
ship. "Hey, Skippy," I called out to him once I was alone in my
cabin.

"Hay is for horses."

"Very funny. I have a request. Some of the crew
are not happy about you calling us monkeys, they, uh, it's hard to explain.
It's a religious thing, they don't like the idea of humans evolving from
monkeys."

"Oh, sure, no problemo, Joe."

Wow. His simple reply surprised me, I had expected a
big argument from him. "Great, thank you, Skippy," I said with great
relief. Damn, I wish everything was that easy.

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to
it," he said simply.

"What?"

"I didn't use that expression correctly?"

"Uh, depends what you meant," I said
carefully. "That expression means you won't have to worry about, whatever
it is, until it happens," I explained. "People are already unhappy,
so we've crossed that bridge. You see?"

"Oh. I meant that I'll worry about it when you
evolve beyond monkeys."

"What?"

"From my viewpoint, monkeys and humans are
identical, so if any evolution went on, I ain't seeing it. You generally don't
fling your poop at each other like monkeys do-"