SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (18 page)

She pointed at the display. "The last jump was
successful, no unfriendlies detected. An hour ago, we went through a molecular
hydrogen cloud, Skippy said the density was something like 3 million atoms per
cubic centimeter, and that's unusual. No effect on the ship. That was our big
excitement for the evening."

Skippy's voice interrupted excitedly. "Also, the
gas cloud was 98% hydrogen and less than 2 percent helium, that is highly
unusual in the interstellar medium. Typically, cool, dense areas of the ISM are
comprised of-"

"Science team, Skippy, please discuss that with
the science team." I said while rolling my eyes, and Adams smiled.

"Sure, if you enjoy being ignorant-"

"Skippy, I'm not embracing ignorance, and I'm not
blowing you off. If you find this interesting, with your vast knowledge of the
galaxy, then our science team will definitely be interested. I could listen to
you, but I couldn't appreciate it the way the science team will."

"Oh. I did think you were blowing me off. All
right, I'll discuss this with the smarter monkeys."

"Thank you, Skippy. Sergeant Adams, I'm here to
liven up your evening, you are the first to hear this. Skippy has rerun
calculations of an optimal search pattern, and we will be able to cut months
off the schedule." The two pilots had turned in their chair while Adams
and I were talking, they both looked surprised to hear the news. "Skippy,
is the new course loaded into the autopilot?"

"Affirmative," Skippy confirmed, "it is
labelled jump option Delta."

"New calculations?" Adams asked, with her
own raised eyebrow. She knew Skippy well enough to figure there was more to the
story. She also knew not to ask.

"A different approach, based on recently
discovered information," I explained. The information Skippy had
discovered recently, was me giving him an idea he should have thought of himself.
That could stay between us. "I'll explain more in the staff meeting,"
a meeting that was the bane of my existence; we had a meeting of team leaders,
every other day, this required me to think of something new to say every other
day. Something new to say, on a ship where one day cruising through
interstellar space was like the day before, and the next.

"Aye, aye, Captain, we'll engage the new course
when we jump next." Adams acknowledged. "The jump coils will be fully
charged in," she glanced at the main display, "one hour and thirty
seven minutes."

"Great. I'm going to get coffee." Otherwise,
I was going to fall back asleep.

Skippy was super, extra mega excited about the next
site on his list, it was the location that he thought was almost certain to
contain an Elder site. What interested me was this system was centered on a
class K orange star, about half the size of Earth's sun, it wasn't just another
too-common red dwarf. Skippy was fairly bursting with confidence, because this
star system, with its location in the Orion Spur near De Mairan's Nebula, was
perfectly situated for an Elder communications node, because of invisible force
lines in the galaxy, or some sciency BS like that Skippy had made a futile
attempt to explain to me.

We found the star system. We did not find any sign of
an Elder facility, or any sign an Elder facility had ever been there. After
four days of intensive scanning, Skippy was frustrated and sounded depressed.
"This makes absolutely zero freakin' sense. Zero! I've proved that my
model for predicting unknown Elder sites is valid. If any place should have an
Elder site, it's this star system. I do not understand this, at all. A moon
orbiting this gas giant is the perfect place. There
should
be an Elder
facility here.

"Should we keep looking, Skippy? Maybe there is
another Elder facility somewhere else in this system."

"Unlikely," he said sourly, disappointment
clear in his voice. "Oh, what the hell, sure, why not. Maybe there's some
unknown minor factor that I'm not taking into account. Do you mind if we take
the ship around the system for a week or so, I want to make some very detailed
sensor readings?"

"We'll go wherever you want, Skippy."

"Really?" He sounded surprised.

"Yeah, duh, you lunkhead. The whole reason we're
out here is to find your magic freakin' radio. We'll go wherever you think we
need to go. Within reason, I'm not endangering the crew without a damned good
reason, you know that. You want the
Dutchman
to hop around this system a
couple days?"

"Five days, a week at the most."

"No problem. This will be a good opportunity for
training. You Ok if we program some of the jumps?"

He sighed. "Ugh. In that case, better plan on ten
days, because we'll be so off target on every jump. You monkeys are lucky to
hit the correct star system."

With the
Flying
Dutchman
making short
hops around the star system, the crew took the opportunity for extensive training
that we couldn't do while the ship was traveling between stars. Pilots had fun
flying dropships, flying the
Flower
in simulated combat, and programming
jumps on our own. We were getting somewhat better at our jump accuracy, despite
Skippy's constant mocking and complaining. The science team, when not examining
the sensor data Skippy was collecting, was also busy training, mostly their
training involved how to use space suits without killing themselves. They also
went through familiarization with ship systems they wouldn't normally have
contact with, such as the sensor and weapons controls in the Combat Information
Center. While I was duty officer on the bridge, three scientists got a tour of
the CIC. It was a slow time for the bridge and CIC crews; all dropships were
safely tucked into their landing bays, and the
Flower
was attached to
its platform for maintenance. There were not any crew outside the ship
practicing space walks, and we weren't scheduled to jump again for another
three hours. Sitting in the command chair, I was taking a quiz about the flight
controls on a Thuranin dropship, and hoping there would be good stuff left over
for lunch when my shift ended at 1400 hours.

One of the scientist, a Doctor Zheng, wandered away
from the CIC and into the bridge. Sergeant Adams hurried over to shoo her away
from me, but I signaled to Adams that I was fine with Zheng being there.

"Doctor Zheng, are you enjoying the tour?" I
asked. She was a biologist and medical doctor, the ship's controls might have
been less interesting to her than to others on the science team.

"It is good to get out of the lab," she said
with a smile. "So far, the only places we've been to have been an
abandoned space station, and some airless moons. There has not been much for a
biologist to do. I've been helping Major Simms in the hydroponics hold."
Before we left Earth, Simms had brought aboard an experimental hydroponics set
up, I think it was something NASA had been playing with. We were growing fresh
vegetables and fruit using hydroponics, our first crop of spinach had been
served in a salad two days ago. "When we came out here, I had hoped for
greater opportunities to study alien biospheres."

Damn. One thing I was not in the mood for right then
was an uncomfortable conversation. "Doctor, I did explain our situation,
our mission, before we left orbit," I said gently, wishing to avoid an
argument. Plus, I could empathize with her, she was bored, with few prospects
of pursuing her life's work. "In fact, I argued against including a
science team. You are not essential to the mission, and you are putting your
lives at great risk being out here. As I told everyone who applied for the
mission, it is unlikely, highly unlikely, that we will ever return to Earth.
Even if the mission is concluded successfully, the ship could be stranded in
deep space."

"If Skippy leaves us?"

"Yes," I said simply.

"Would you really do it?" She pointed to the
self-destruct button on the left arm of the captain's chair, under its clear
plastic protective cover with 'SELF DESTRUCT' in large red letters. To press
the button, the duty officer needed to turn a lever that held the clear plastic
cover down, flip the cover back out of the way, press the button once to
activate, then hold the button down to confirm. At the same time, another
officer in the CIC needed to do the same to the self-destruct button there, as
a precaution against accidents, or somebody going crazy. Precautions were all
fine ideas, and assuring to the crew, in reality Skippy wouldn't allow the
nukes to detonate unless I ordered them to explode, and Skippy agreed.
"Would you destroy the ship, if we were stranded? Or if aliens were going
to board the ship and learn humans are out here?"

"I'd do it without hesitation." I said
grimly.

Her raised eyebrows told me I'd surprised her, and not
in a good way. "That's-"

"Without hesitation, because if I took time to
think about it, I might not do it." I added. "Army training is damned
good, it not only trains you for what to do, it trains you to do it no matter
what the conditions. Trains you to do what you have to, even when you're tired,
and you're hungry, and you're injured, and people are shooting at you. You've
seen soldiers taking apart their weapons, and putting them back together, over
and over, blindfolded?"

She nodded.

"We do that so the action is in our muscle
memory, and we don't have to think about it. Like tying your shoes. You don't
really need to think about it, right, you've done it so many times that your
fingers know what to do?"

"I never thought about it like that."

"I am not going to self-destruct the ship unless
we absolutely have to. If we have to, I will do it. We can't allow our actions
out here to put Earth at risk." I could see my little speech hadn't help
her mood any, so I added "One thing I can tell you, Doctor, is that
anything can happen out here. You may very well get an opportunity to study
alien biology, first hand."

She nodded silently, unconvinced. Sergeant Adams took
that cue to usher her out of the bridge, and I went back to my dropship flight
controls quiz. Or, I tried to. Talking about self-destructing the ship had put
a damper on my mood also. Now I was really hoping there as something good left
in the galley when my shift ended.

While the
Dutchman
hopped around the star
system, I took the opportunity for real flight training, including my first
solo flight in a dropship. Skippy announced he grudgingly, reluctantly, had to
concede that it was possible, possible although extremely unlikely, that I
might be able to fly an actual dropship away from the
Dutchman
, without
immediately destroying both the dropship and the star carrier. For my first
solo flight, he did request we first eject his escape pod out to a safe
distance, a request I denied. The whole time I was flying, a simple loop around
the
Dutchman
and back into the landing bay, he grumbled, second-guessed
everything I did, and predicted doom for me and everyone aboard our starship.

On my own, I got the dropship lined up to re-enter the
landing bay, and manually flew it in, using gentle, precise movements with the
thrusters. While the
Dutchman
usually took control of dropships and
guided them in, for pilot training we needed to learn how to handle the task
manually. My first attempt to settle the dropship into the docking clamps
missed by less than half a meter. Keep in mind, this smaller type of Thuranin
dropship was still almost forty meters long, it wasn't like flying a little
Cessna. Even the smallest dropship needs the capability to drop down through an
atmosphere without burning up from heat, and the ability to lift itself,
passengers and cargo all the way from the surface into orbit, and sometimes
beyond. The incredibly advanced technology of the Thuranin couldn't shrink a
dropship any smaller than a medium-size airliner on Earth. Flying in the vacuum
and zero gravity of interstellar space, the dropship still had substantial
mass, when it got moving in the wrong direction, it took a lot of force from
thrusters to correct its course. One little adjustment from me, got the dot of
light centered over the docking clamps in the cockpit display, and I pressed
the button to engage the clamps. As the dropship was pulled down and secured, I
announced "
Dutchman
, this is Barney, down and secured. Powering
down now." Barney was my stupid pilot callsign, I wanted something cool
like 'Rocketman', the problem with that notion was that traditionally, pilots
do not get to choose their own callsigns. Your callsign is chosen for you by
other pilots, and a request for anything too cool, like 'TopGun', is
immediately shot down by your fellow pilots. 'Barney' was the least humiliating
of my callsign options. I had to talk our pilot community out of calling me
'Buzzer', a name they wanted to give me, because of the number of times the
cockpit warning buzzer had gone off while I was flying. Stupid buzzer, I
suspected that Skippy made the damned thing go off at random just to mess with
me.

Desai replied, "Barney, welcome back! Closing
landing bay doors now."

"Roger,
Dutchman
, how did I do?"

Skippy answered before Desai could speak. "It is
a miracle! Truly a freakin' miracle. Barney, the fact that we all survived you
flying on your own, is compelling evidence of divine intervention."

"You did just fine, Colonel Bishop," Desai
assured me. "Your first solo flight was a success; you are ready for the
next phase of training. We'll find a nice asteroid or small moon for you to
land one, somewhere."

"Great!" I safed the controls and unstrapped
from the seat. "Desai, after I finish dropship training, I can start
learning about systems aboard the
Flower
?"

"Yes, sir, it is not that diff-" she started
to say.

"What? Joe is going to try flying a starship? Oh
man, forget it," Skippy moaned. "The galaxy is doomed. Doomed! Look,
you need to drop me off somewhere first, I'll put together a list of
uninhabited planets."

We stayed there for nine days. It was nine days of
excellent training for the crew, and the science team got to pour over the
super-detailed sensor data that Skippy was collecting. Skippy confirmed the
star system was, indeed, a perfect location for an Elder comm node. He
confirmed there absolutely should be an Elder facility there. And he also
confirmed there was no sign the Elders had ever been there. For several days,
he was quiet, not making his usual snarky comments, not engaging me when I
tried to provoke him, so I changed tactics and was extra nice to him. That may
have helped, or maybe he perked up simply because we got to the next site and
he had something to occupy himself.

The fifth star system we investigated was another
disappointment. It was not a disappointment in terms of us not finding an Elder
facility where Skippy predicted there should be one. It was not a
disappointment in terms of the Elder site having been looted of all the
valuable stuff long ago. It was a disappointment because the place was smashed
to bits.

This site, unlike most of the sites we’d seen so far,
was not on an airless moon orbiting a gas giant planet. This site was on a
planet, about half the size of Earth, that had a thin atmosphere composed
mostly of carbon dioxide. From what we could detect from orbit, it was
lifeless, unless there were organisms in the soil.

The disappointment was caused by the fact that the
Elder clearly had built a facility there, a large facility, and that the
surface of the planet had been extensively bombarded by meteors. Skippy’s
analysis determined that this star system used to have a normal asteroid field,
and that somehow the orbits of the asteroids had been disrupted, to send rocks
careening around the system. The two innermost planets, including the one with
the Elder facility, had gotten pounded over millions of years, and the bombardment
was still continuing.