SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (16 page)

"Flight training? We're back to basic maneuvers,
we got sloppy last week. We developed bad habits."

"Fun, though," I said with a grin,
"wasn't it?"

"Oh," she laughed, "yes, the most fun
I've had since I learned to fly. Burning the
Flower's
engine to fling it
on a low pass over a moon at eight gees?" She shook her head gleefully.
"Nothing compares to that. The
Dutchman
is a much better tool for
traveling between stars, but she's an ungainly pig in normal space."

"Glad you enjoyed it. I have a question; can you
teach me to fly?"

"Teach you to fly?" She said it slowly, as
if she wasn't sure she'd heard me correctly.

"The basics. I've been training with our special
forces, I'm not good enough to be one of them, and I haven't trained with any
team long enough to be useful. The reason I'm doing that is to understand the
tactics and capabilities of each team, so if I ever order them to do something,
I will be informed about what they can do, and how. Skippy’s little tutorial on
Space Combat Maneuvers opened my eyes to how much I don’t know, and how
dangerous that is. If we ever get into space combat, I want to know what our
ships can do, and how they do it." I took a sip of coffee. "If we are
ever shorthanded, like when we raided that asteroid, it would be useful for me
to fill in as a copilot. And also, there may be situations where," I
looked around the galley, and lowered my voice, "I don't want to ask
someone else to go on a mission. Situations where taking a pilot with me is only
putting another person at risk. You know what I mean, Desai."

She knew, she frowned, and gave me a brief, wordless
nod of her head. "Do you have any flying experience at all?"

"None. Never taken a flight lesson, not even a
ride in a single-engine plane."

"Good," she announced to my surprise.
"You won't have any habits to unlearn. Flight training on Earth is all
about aerodynamics, using airspeed to create lift. That doesn't apply out here,
not even when you're flying a dropship in an atmosphere. When I got to Camp
Alpha for flight training, I thought being a helicopter pilot would be an
advantage in flying a vertical takeoff ship like a Buzzard. I was wrong. Even a
helicopter applies the principles of aerodynamics to fly, the rotor blades act
as wings. There is a saying," she smiled, "that helicopters don't use
aerodynamics to fly, they just beat the air into submission. With dropships and
aircraft like the Buzzard, that isn't a joke, their jets are powerful enough to
hover even at high altitude, and they don't rely on wings generating lift to
keep them in the air. Dropships spend most of their time in vacuum anyway,
aerodynamics aren't a factor at all. Not having to learn the principles of
aerodynamics will have a tremendous amount of time. You want to learn to fly,
then?"

"The basics, yes. Enough for emergencies. Can you
do that? Teach me?"

She took a sip of tea and thought a minute, I
appreciated that she put thought into it, rather than merely indulging the whim
of her commanding officer. "We can try. Basic maneuvers in space are not
all that difficult, it's the navigation that is tricky, particularly orbital
mechanics. We will start with a dropship first, if you get that, we'll move on
to the
Flower
. Our stolen frigate is nimble; she flies like a large
dropship. I'm sending you," she tapped her iPad, "a list of training
courses."

I suppressed a groan. More training materials to read.
Great. "I can't wait to get started. Thank you, Captain Desai."

"You are welcome, Colonel Bishop."

My flight training did not take up much of Desai's
time, because when Skippy discovered that I wanted to learn how to fly, he
insisted on training me personally. He wasn't being nice, of course, because me
learning how to pilot a dropship gave him endless material for amusement, and a
whole new arena to insult me and question my intelligence. Unfortunately for
him, I took the training very seriously, and as Desai had explained, because I
was starting from absolute zero, I didn't have any habits or preconceived
notions to overcome. Even reading the training material was interesting, the
whole subject was new to me. I spent a lot of time in a simulator, making
egregious mistakes and listening to Skippy belittle me. The crew, especially my
XO, appreciated me being super busy with flight training, it meant I was out of
their way and not interfering with the proper operation of the ship. For me, it
meant my hours, when not taking duty shifts on the bridge, and training with
the SpecOps teams, was taken up by intensive learning of a subject totally new
to me. It also meant that, darn it, I did not have time to take the officer
training courses that I was already behind on. Every night, or morning or
afternoon, depending on my duty shift schedule, I was so tired that I fell into
dreamless slumber as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Good times.

Before the final jump approaching our first of the new
set of targets, we tried programming another jump by ourselves, without
Skippy's help. Before we went into action, we wanted to know whether there was
any possibility we could handle the ship on our own. This time, we spent only
one full day calculating which coordinates to program into the navigation
computer, our science team was somewhat more confident this time than their
first try. Skippy's PowerPoint presentation, about what had gone wrong the
first time we programmed a jump, had indeed dazzled our brilliant science team,
particularly the part where he pointed out that the speed of light was a
variable, and that, technically, the ship emerged on the other side of a jump
slightly before initiating a jump. That last part blew my mind. Anyway, Major
Simms was in the command chair for this jump, it was her duty shift, I stood
beside the command chair and tried not to interfere. Like that was going to
happen.

"All systems report ready for jump," Desai
reported from the left-hand pilot seat. Until we figured out how to jump
correctly, our most experienced pilot was going to be at the helm for all jumps
programmed by humans.

"Engage jump countdown," Simms ordered.

"This is exciting," Skippy said. "To
Bed, Bath, and Beyond!"

Simms and I shared a glance. "I think you mean
'to infinity and beyond', Skippy." I said.

"No, I figured we'd start with something small.
Infinity is too ambitious for monkeys."

I didn't respond, as the jump countdown timer on the
display read 3,2,1-

And we jumped. From one empty region of interstellar
space to another.

"Jump successful," Desai reported.
"Calculating position now."

"Ahhhhh, you'll take forever, I can't stand the
suspense. We emerged within fifty thousand kilometers of the target."
Skippy announced cheerily, our goal for this second jump was to be within one
hundred thousand kilometers. "Good monkeys! Great job! Bananas for
everyone!"

"Skippy!" I admonished him. "Be nice
for a change."

"What? Monkeys love bananas."

I did like bananas, couldn't argue with him there.

The actual final jump was programmed by Skippy, it
took us just outside the target star system, which had a rather common and
uninteresting red dwarf star, with three planets, a rocky inner planet and two
gas giants. None of the planets were anything special. What Skippy found
interesting is there were signs the red dwarf star used to be a class K star,
which is a larger orange star. How it went from a class K to a red dwarf,
Skippy thought, might have involved manipulation by the Elders, he said
sometimes when the Elders needed a lot of energy for a project, they would
extract it from an unimportant star that nobody needed. So, Skippy thought the
Elders might have had a research facility, or monitoring station there. And,
back when the Elders still inhabited the galaxy in physical form, something
about force lines, or some damned thing he'd tried to explain that I hadn't
understood and even had our scientists scratching their heads, meant this star
system would have been an especially good place to locate a communications
node. That was why we were checking out a star system that was so boringly
ordinary, around three quarters of all the stars in the galaxy were red dwarfs.

Colonel Chang's voice came over the bridge speakers.
"
Dutchman
, this is the
Flower
, we are ready for jump."

"Roger,
Flower
, good luck, and be careful.
Especially the careful part.” The little frigate would be jumping into the star
system to recon the place, without putting the
Flying
Dutchman
at
risk.

"Understood, we will take all precautions."
Skippy had preloaded the
Flower's
navigation system with multiple jump
options in case of trouble. "Be back as soon as we can."

On the display, the
Flower
disappeared in a
brief flash of gamma rays. Chang had taken her out, with Desai as the chief
pilot. Desai is the only person who had flown that ship, and if they got into
trouble, I wanted Chang to have our most experienced pilot with him. The
Dutchman
would be fine without Desai, we were in deep space, with plenty of pilots, and
Skippy aboard if anything went wrong. The mission was simple, it should be
safe: jump in near the second planet, because Skippy thought the most likely
place the Elders would have had a base is on a moon circling the second planet.
Jump in, first scan for ships. Then scan for artificial activity anywhere near
the planet. If ships, or any signs of hostile intelligent life are detected,
jump away immediately, jump back to the
Dutchman
, and we both get the
hell out of there. If nothing dangerous is detected, scan the moons for signs
of any sort of Elder facility. Skippy thought we'd have much better luck
finding signs of an Elder base, using the more sophisticated sensors aboard the
Flying
Dutchman
, the
Flower
would only be looking for
anything obvious.

It should be easy; it should be safe. It worried the
hell out of me. Our partly beat-up, second-hand, stolen Kristang frigate,
relying on technology the lizards had stolen from higher-tech species and
didn't quite understand, was out there all alone, without Skippy to guide them.
Detaching the frigate to recon the target had been Chang's idea, we had
discussed it at length, me arguing against it, until I had to give up and
concede that Chang was absolutely right. Risking the
Flower
was
preferable to risking the
Dutchman
. Aboard the frigate was a nuke, for
Chang to use for destroying his ship, if it was at risk of being captured. Our
nukes were each encased in a jacket of contaminants that, according to Skippy
and our scientists, would conceal the human origin of the devices. Apparently,
the chemical or atomic makeup of a nuclear device was like a fingerprint, it
would point right back to who made it, when, even the particular facility that
generated the material. All of that was news to me, I thought a nuke was a
nuke.

Thinking about the
Flower
self-destructing was
not helping my anxiety as time dragged on. "Hey, Skippy, you said one of
the planets here is rocky? That means it has a solid surface, right, it doesn't
mean it has to be a lifeless rock like Mercury?"

"Correct. 'Rocky' also does not mean it can beat
up other planets in a fight."

"Wow, look at you, showing off your pop culture
knowledge."

"The other two planets here are like Neptune in
your home solar system, they are smallish gas giants. No large rings around
either of them."

How could something 'giant' also be described as
'smallish'? I let it slide, because that is something Skippy could easily spend
half an hour arguing about. "The rocky one, is it livable?"

"Uh, that would be resounding no, Joe. True, it
is at a distance from the star where surface temperature might be considered
habitable for carbon and water based life forms, a distance your species calls
the 'Goldilocks zone'. Not too hot, not too cold. That's a good description, by
the way, I'm going to keep using it. Huh, something useful from monkeys, who'd
have thunk it, huh? Although, when you think about it, Goldilocks was a bit of
a dimwitted bee-atch. Who falls asleep in a house owned by bears? Why would
they need to eat bland porridge, when they could eat her for dinner? The story
illustrates a good point, but it makes no sense at all. Now, there are human
fairy tales I find sensible, although they are, of course, all somewhat
fanciful, being-"

"Skippy?"

"Yeah?"

"This rocky planet? It's not livable?"

"I was getting to that. Where was I? Oh, yeah.
Livable planets around red dwarf stars are exceedingly rare in this galaxy.
Because red dwarf stars emit very low energy, a planet has to be so close to
the star to be warm enough for supporting life, that its surface becomes
tidally locked. That means like your moon, one side always faces the object it
is orbiting. One side of the planet is warm, but the other side is frozen
solid, so cold that any atmosphere might freeze and fall to the surface as
snow. And red dwarves are highly variable, the amount of light they emit can
dim substantially for lengthy periods, other times they can throw out large
solar flares, strong enough to burn off the atmosphere of any rocky planet,
over time."

"Got it. I will scratch red dwarves off any
future house hunting trips."

"A wise choice. Hey, talking about dwarves
reminds me of a fairy tale-"

I let him ramble on, it kept him busy, and helped me
pass the time while waiting for the
Flower
to return.

Return it did, exactly on time. We had allotted forty
minutes for the mission, jump out to return jump, if it had been late we were
jumping the
Dutchman
in close enough to find out what happened, it the
Flower
had returned early, we'd assume she had hostile ships on her tail. Neither
happened. "
Dutchman
, this is the
Flower
," Chang said,
"success, we found an artificial structure on one of the moons, right
where Mr. Skippy thought it would be."

"Told you so," Skippy said smugly.

For a change, I ignored the arrogant little beer can.
"That's good news,
Flower
. Transfer navigation control to Skippy,
so we can take you aboard ASAP."

"Roger that,
Dutchman
."

CHAPTER 6 ELDER SITES ARE DRY HOLES

After the first three sites where Skippy thought we
might find unmapped Elder sites, we set course for the fourth potential site, a
journey that was going to take almost five weeks, because we had to go through
three wormholes that weren’t easily connected to each other. After the
disappointment of not finding a comm node at three sites already, I was very
much not looking forward to five weeks of boredom. The science team was happy,
busy, enthralled by pouring over the mountain of data we had collected already.
Skippy was in a bad mood, not his usual jovial self, he was pissed off by our
failures to find a magical radio, and frustrated and puzzled by not
understanding why the last site had been replaced by a perfectly scooped-out
hole. The people who were bored were the pilots and the SpecOps teams. For the
pilots, the next five weeks would be no more interesting than a shuttle run
from DC to New York and back. Other than us trying to program a couple jumps
each week, the only thing the pilots had to look forward to was combat
simulations, and simulating landings with our Thuranin dropships. The SpecOps
teams had nothing to do, other than training over and over. Considering that
I’d made it perfectly clear I wished to avoid combat, the highlight of the next
month for the special forces was a cooking contest. I seriously needed to do
something about morale. Maybe a basketball tournament, one of the few sports we
could play in our small gym.

Exercising in the gym helped keep my sanity, I was on
my way there one morning, when I stopped in the middle of the corridor.
"Oh, damn it."

"What is it, Joe?" Skippy asked. "I'm
monitoring all ship functions, and everything is operating nominally at the
moment."

"No, it's, it's nothing. I forgot something,
that's all."

"Damn it, did you forget to pick up your mother
at the airport before we left Earth? I'm sure she's gotten a ride by now. Or
she walked home. Kind of too late now."

"No, Skippy, I did not forget her at the
airport."

"This time."

"Oh for- that was one freakin' time!"

"Pretty impressive there, Joe. Most people go
their whole lives without leaving a close relative stuck at an airport for five
hours, you did that when you were only seventeen. You were a precocious
disappointment."

"That happened one freakin' time, and I'll never
hear the end of it. It was Amanda's fault, anyway, if she hadn't distracted
me-"

"Thinking with the wrong head, huh?"

"Skippy, I was a young, stupid kid back
then."

"Huh. You're under the illusion that you are
different now?"

"Yeah. I'm not as young. Anyway, I inherited that
forgetfulness. When I was seven years old, my father took me to a Red Sox game
at Fenway park, after the game he used the bathroom while I went to go buy a T
shirt, and he forgot about me. He was across the Maine state line before he
realized I wasn't in the car."

"Huh. This story I haven't heard. What
happened?"

Standing in the corridor aboard the
Flying
Dutchman
,
I could remember that day like it was yesterday. "I waited on Boyleston
Street, anybody who saw me probably figured my old man was drinking in a bar
and told me to stand outside. I remember a peanut vendor gave me a free bag of
peanuts, he must have felt sorry for me. Anyway, after a couple hours, it's
really dark and it's getting chilly, this was in early June, my father's car
pulls up, and all he says is 'there you are'. I got in, and we drove to my
uncle's place in Brunswick for the night."

"That's a good story. How come I didn't hear that
before?"

"How did you hear about me forgetting my mother
at the Bangor airport?"

"Your mother talked about it to her sister, while
you were home, right before we went up to the
Dutchman
. I was listening
to everyone at that party."

"That was a good party," I said sadly,
thinking back to the last day I was on Earth.

Maybe a hundred people had stopped by my parents'
house that afternoon, excited to see someone who had returned from the stars.
They all wanted to see 'Barney' Bishop, and I didn't mind people in my hometown
calling me that. To keep things as low-key as possible, our Thuranin dropship
had landed in the road right in front of my parents' house. I had called my
parents from Paris, saying that I would be dropping by for a short visit,
staying over only one night. Sergeant Kendall and two people of her Air Force
security team accompanied me, I slept that night on a couch in my parents'
house, while the security people overnighted in the back of a National Guard
truck in the driveway. Skippy by that time was already back aboard the
Dutchman
,
getting the ship ready for departure, and remotely flying dropships to bring
supplies up into orbit.

To say that I slept on the couch was an exaggeration,
I only managed maybe three hours of shut-eye that night. There had been too
many people who wanted to meet me, talk with me, and too many questions.
Questions about what I had been doing, what was going on with UNEF on Paradise,
and what lay in Earth's future. The Kristang no longer had Earth under their
iron grip, but people knew there were plenty more Kristang in the galaxy, and a
Thuranin ship hung in low orbit, and the Ruhar were still out there also.

To answer all those questions, I had a lame cover
story that UNEF, and the US government, wanted me to stick closely to. Before I
left Paris, I'd been forced to endure a four-hour briefing, including a mock
question and answer session. By the time I was done, my head was spinning so
much that I had a hard time remembering which was the cover story, and which
was the truth. The cover story was that I and a few other UNEF soldiers were
brought back to Earth on a Thuranin star carrier, for some mission that I
couldn't talk about. When we got here, the Thuranin learned the Kristang had
been abusing an ally, so the Thuranin took appropriate action, and wiped the
Kristang out. Me being on Earth was a quick visit, I needed to get back aboard
the Thuranin ship to continue our voyage to wherever we were going, which was
top secret. The UN Expeditionary Force on Paradise was doing great,
communications between Paradise and Earth were spotty because of enemy
activity, but there was nothing to worry about. Everything was wonderful, Earth
was safe, and every morning people would wake up to sunshine and birds signing.
Or some BS like that, I tried to stick to the script as much as possible, with
Sergeant Kendall watching me like a hawk. For her sake, I was on my best
behavior, because while I would be leaving Earth, she would be stuck behind
with the consequences.