SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (19 page)

“Is there anything left down there?” I asked
hopefully. On the display, a map showed the original outlines of the Elder
base, it had sprawled over two kilometers in diameter. Surely something that
size could not have been completely wiped out of existence.”

“No,” Skippy sighed, “there’s a whole lot of nothin’
down there, Joe. A big meteor went splat practically right on top of the place,
about three or four million years ago, and there are impacts in the area before
and after the big rock fell. Any Elder artifacts that survived the big impact
would have been thrown far away, there is a debris field extending three
hundred kilometers from the impact site.”

“Three hundred kilometers?” I asked, astonished.

“Meteors can be big, Joe. This planet has been hit
many times by objects larger than the one that hit the Yucatan on Earth and
finished off the dinosaurs.”

“Damn. Are there any meteors, or asteroids or
whatever, that will hit soon?”

“I haven’t completed a scan of the entire system yet;
I can tell you there aren’t any objects larger than a basketball that will
impact within the next month. Why? Are you thinking of going down there?”

“Yeah. We can scan the surface, right, and if we find
any Elder stuff that’s still intact, we should go check it out. Also, our
pilots should get experience flying dropships in an atmosphere. This could also
be a good place for practicing ground assaults. As long as we’re here, we might
as well take the opportunity.”

He sighed heavily. “Sure, why not?”

“Listen, Skippy, I know you’re disappointed, we all
are. Again, your method of predicting the location of Elder sites has been
pretty damned accurate so far, right? We’re on the trail, it’s only a matter of
time now.”

The
Dutchman
stayed in orbit around the fifth
site for seven days, when we conducted extensive training. The science team was
given permission to go down to the surface also, after I made them go through
an hour of begging and whining about it. Dr. Zheng, the biologist, was super
excited to find microorganisms in the soil, Skippy declared they didn’t pose
any threat to human biology, so I let her bring samples aboard the ship. Part
of the training was for ground troops to test the portable shelters we’d
constructed, Captain Smythe and his SAS team stayed overnight in shelters on
the surface. They were scheduled to come back aboard in the morning, and I got
up early to prepare a treat for them in the galley. "Crap! Damn it, I
wanted to make cinnamon rolls to go with breakfast, but this worthless dough
isn't rising." I jiggled the bowl with the dough, as if that was going to
help. The dough just sat there unhelpfully, looking stupid and uncooperative.

Adams peered over the counter at the dough.
"Smells good."

"No," I had to admit, "that's the
cinnamon sugar mix I was going to put in it." As a colonel, I should have
been able to order the dough to rise. That hadn't worked. "Well, if this
doesn't rise, maybe I can pass it off as cinnamon pita bread?"

Adams laughed. "I don't think you're going to
fool anyone with that."

“It’s your fault, Joe,” Skippy said through a speaker.
“You didn’t give the dough anything to feed on. You didn’t use the sugar, like
you were supposed to.”

“There’s plenty of sugar here, Skippy,” I pointed to
the plastic bowl next to the dough.

“I mean, you’re supposed to put some sugar in the
dough, dumdum. The yeast eats the sugar, and create gas that causes the dough
to rise. Did you even read the instructions?”

“Uh,” I said guiltily, “sort of.” I had seen ‘sugar’
in the recipe. Cinnamon rolls looked easy when my mother made them. “It’s
doomed, then?”

“Could be. I’ve performed a chemical analysis; it is
possible you could still rescue that awful mess. Put some plastic wrap over the
top, cover it with a towel, and put it near that heat lamp to your left. Not
under the heat lamp, just near it.”

“Thanks, Skippy.”

“No problem. I calculate a 62% chance of success. Next
time, read the recipe, huh? I can’t do
all
of your thinking for you.”

Skippy saved the day, the dough rose somewhat, and
people loved the cinnamon rolls. Sure, maybe they mostly liked the sweet icing
I put on top.

After Smythe’s team came back aboard, we retrieved the
dropships, and jumped away to check out the sixth potential site. The crew was
exhausted from the grueling training we’d conducted, it was good that it was
going to take us two weeks to get to the next target, people needed rest and
equipment needed maintenance. Skippy’s mood could have used some improvement
also.

Three days of stand-down rest left the crew refreshed,
and we went back to a normal schedule. After the excitement of training on a
planet, the crew and the science team were all eagerly anticipating what we
would find next. I tried to temper their enthusiasm, what we didn’t need was
another disappointment sinking morale. We needed diversions aboard the ship, I
made plans to meet Major Simms at dinner, to talk about what sort of fun we
could have, with the supplies she’d brought on board. The British team was
cooking that day, it was something they called ‘Sunday Roast dinner,’ and it
smelled delicious when I walked in the galley.

Then I looked at it. There was some sort of green,
wrinkly, stiff vegetable-looking thing on the side of my plate. Next to the
roast chicken and Yorkshire pudding and the carrots and the scalloped potatoes,
it was out of place, like someone had crumpled up a green napkin and left it
there.
Simms
was sitting to my left, I whispered to her, keeping quiet to avoid insulting
the British team. "Major, what is this?"

"You ever been to a salad bar at a
restaurant?" She asked quietly. "The salad stuff is in bowls, the
bowls are on top of a bed of ice, and in between is this stuff."

A light bulb when on in my head. "Oh, yeah, I've
seen this stuff." With a fork, I poked at it. "I thought that was
plastic decoration, it was supposed to be lettuce or something. That stuff is
real? It's supposed to be food?"

"It is food, it's kale. It's good. Look, it's not
limp like lettuce."

She was right, it moved under my fork like it was
crisp. "Kale, yeah, I’ve heard of it. They deep-fried it?"

"I don't know how they prepared it," now she
poked it with a fork suspiciously.

"You know what would make it better?" I
stabbed the kale with a fork and sniffed at it. "If you did deep-fry it,
but replaced the kale with a Snickers bar."

"Or a Twinkie," Taylor said. "You ever
try a deep-fried Twinkie? They have them at the state fair in Tennessee."

"A deep-fried Twinkie. Unbelievable." Skippy
said from the speaker in the ceiling. "This is proof there is a God."

"Huh?" I asked. "How do you figure
that?"

"Because this clearly shows you monkeys are so
freakin' stupid, there's no way you could have survived until now, without
divine intervention helping you."

"Amazing," I took a bite of the kale, if
that's what it was. It wasn't bad. "Whatever this is, apparently it's a
religious experience for Skippy."

"I didn't say, oh, forget it." People
laughed. Not at me this time, at
Skippy
. "Shut up, all of
you."

"Wow, that was a snappy comeback. Bye,
Skippy," I said, "pleasant dreams." I could get to like kale. If
that's what it was.

A thought occurred to me, while sitting in my office,
three days before we were scheduled to arrive at the next target. It was not a
pleasant thought. I pulled up a schematic of the ship on my iPad, then an
external view we'd taken from one of the Thuranin dropships. "Skippy, how
many star carriers like the
Dutchman
do the Thuranin have?"

"If you mean this particular type or class of
ship, they have hundreds. It is a common design they have used for almost four
hundred years, with little change." He snorted. "Little change,
because in the last four hundred years, the Thuranin haven't managed to steal
enough higher technology to improve their piece of junk starships. Or they
stole it, and can't figure out how it works. Stupid little green
pinheads."

"They have hundreds exactly like the
Dutchman
?
No little differences?" I knew the United States Navy had 'standard' ship
designs like the
Arleigh
Burke
destroyers, but among those ships
were subclasses that an experienced sailor could identify at a glance.

"Oh. Yeah, sure, there are subtle differences, as
ships are overhauled or upgraded over the years. There are, or were, about
seventy ships almost identical to our
Flying
Dutchman
. Why? Were
you hoping our pirate ship is something special? A collector's item or
something?"

"The opposite, Skippy, I'm hoping there is
nothing unique about the
Dutchman
that can be easily identified. If
someone gets close enough for a good look at us, or our stealth field fails, I
don't want the Thuranin realizing this is the same ship that disappeared near
Paradise, where there are humans, and the wormhole near the human home world
mysteriously shut down around the same time this ship disappeared. That might
make a suspicious Thuranin ask too many questions."

"I see your point, and it is a good one, Joe. The
Thuranin tend to be rather paranoid about security."

"Not paranoid enough, they didn't count on Skippy
the Magnificent."

"True, I am magnificent. And, if you were being
sincere for a change, thank you."

"Sincere. I give you props when you've earned it,
Skippy. All right, have the Thuranin lost a star carrier just like this one?
Lost, like, they didn't see it get destroyed in battle, all they know is it
went missing somewhere."

"Hmmm, that's a tough one, I need to search the
Thuranin database. Uh, no, unfortunately, no ship exactly like this configuration
is missing, other than the
Dutchman
."

"Crap."

"However," Skippy added with a touch of a
smirk to his voice, "a star carrier very similar to the
Dutchman
did disappear mysteriously in this sector seventeen years ago. At the time, it
was fully loaded with heavy Kristang warships. The Thuranin found debris from
several of that star carrier's escort ships, but never any sign of the star
carrier itself, or of even a single one of the Kristang ships. At the time, the
Thuranin accused the Kristang of having stolen their star carrier, while the
Kristang accused their patrons of destroying an entire Kristang heavy
battlegroup. According to the databanks I downloaded from both the Thuranin and
Kristang, neither side admits to knowing what happened."

"Or they do know, and they're not stupid enough
to put it in a database aboard a ship."

"True, although in this case, I suspect the
Thuranin truly do not know what happened to that ship. I suspect nefarious
action by the Kristang, they would gladly throw away a battlegroup of their own
crappy ships, in order to capture a Thuranin starship with an advanced jump
drive. That missing ship is close enough to the
Dutchman
, especially
with modifications that would have inevitably been made in the past seventeen
years, that we could easily pass for that ship. The Thuranin identify their
ships by quantum fluctuations embedded in the jump drive fields, each ship is
unique. I could adjust our drive coils to mimic the missing ship's
signature."

I gave a big thumb's up, knowing Skippy could see
that. "That would be excellent. Not only do we avoid the Thuranin
suspecting humans stole their ship, we may sow distrust between the Thuranin
and the Kristang."

Skippy laughed. "Oh, boo hoo. Gosh, it would be
just awful for the lizards and little green men to get any more hateful of each
other."

"Yeah, keep in mind, we'd rather no one gets a
good look at the
Dutchman
, you keep using your magic to make people out
there think we're a Jeraptha ship."

"Understood. Hey, between us, we came up with a
good idea. Mostly me, of course."

As a monkey, I wasn't going to argue with him.
"Of course."

Our investigation of the sixth potential site for an
Elder base started well enough. To get there from the fifth site, we didn't
need Skippy to wake up a dormant wormhole, or create a new connection for an
active wormhole. We only needed to make normal transits through two regular,
established wormholes, and then jump for about five days to another star system
that was nothing special. This star system was not centered on yet another
boring red dwarf star, this one was a yellow dwarf star, which I assumed meant
it was small. It was upsetting to learn from Skippy, and our science team, that
our own home star, The Sun, was itself classified a yellow dwarf. That didn't
seem right to me. I remember being in school, I think it was the third grade,
seeing a model of our solar system, where the Earth was the size of a ping pong
ball, and the Sun was a basketball. And I remember my teacher Ms. Carmichael,
who I had a huge crush on and still do, telling us that if the model was to
scale, the Sun would be over a million times the size of the Earth! That blew
my little third-grade mind. To our astrophysics team, however, our Sun was
nothing special in the galaxy, a fact they assured me was very good for
humanity, because it meant our Sun provided an environment for life to
flourish, while the Sun was still young enough to be burning hydrogen instead
of helium. Or something like that, I still felt they were dissing our home
star. When I hear 'burning hydrogen', I think of the Hindenburg. That's not
good.

This particular yellow dwarf star we investigated was
about seven percent larger than our sun, but slightly cooler, it was older and,
according to Skippy and our science team, closer to the end of its life, having
burned a lot of its hydrogen supply. Our science team couldn't decide what they
were more excited about, the possibility of recovering Elder artifacts, or
getting a close look at an older G-type star with the
Flying
Dutchman's
sophisticated sensors.

We followed our now-routine procedure; the
Dutchman
jumped to the edge of the star system, and the
Flower
jumped in to recon
gas giant moons. Although this star system could have supported life, it had
only two lifeless rocky inner planets, neither of which orbited in the
Goldilocks zone. There were three gas giants, the
Flower
was first going
to check the biggest one, a planet thirty percent more massive than Jupiter. If
there was no Elder site on a moon around the largest planet, the
Flower
would return to check in with us, then proceed to investigate the other two gas
giants.

The
Flower
returned exactly on time, to report
excitedly they had detected a possible Elder facility on a small moon, and no
sign the place had been ransacked already. Skippy figured someone, at some
time, must have checked out the system, because it had a G-type star, but once
it was determined the system had no habitable planets, no one had bothered to
look any closer. This time, I was hoping, we would hit the jackpot.

The
Flower
docked again, we waited for her crew
to rejoin us while Skippy analyzed that ship's sensor data. "Looks good,
Skippy?" I asked.

"It's hard to tell anything, with that ship's
crappy Kristang sensors," he complained. When we'd taken the frigate, when
we had captured an alien
starship
, I'd thought that was the most awesome
thing that could ever happen. Since then, Skippy had explained that the
Flower
had been purchased third-hand by the White Wind clan, that her sensors were in
bad condition, long obsolete even by Kristang standards, and the ship overall
had been poorly maintained in the past decade. "The stupid scanners keep
drifting out of calibration, I can barely tell whether I'm looking at a moon or
empty space."

"The sensors again, yup, I hear you." Man, I
was tired of listening to Skippy complain about the equipment he had to work
with. "Did they find a potential Elder site, or not?"

"With this sensor data, it could be an Elder
science facility, or it could be an alien car wash, I can't tell for
sure."

"Fine, we'll know when we take the
Dutchman
in. Any sign of other ships?"

"No. Again, it's hard to tell anything, the
Flower
is practically blind. It doesn't help that this planet has an extremely
powerful magnetic field, there is so much noise in the sensor data that the
Thuranin could hide a whole stealthed fleet there, and the
Flower
wouldn't have seen it."

"Colonel Chang?" I asked, he had returned
from commanding the frigate and was standing beside me.

Chang knew Skippy's low opinion of the frigate.
"We didn't detect any threats. I recommend we jump in with the
Dutchman
."

"Skippy?" I asked.

The shiny beer can sighed. "Yeah, sure, I agree,
why not? We can always jump back out."

He was going to regret saying that.

We all were.

Skippy programmed a jump that took us within easy
dropship range from the Elder site; close enough for the
Dutchman's
sensors to thoroughly scan the site, far enough way that the moon's gravity
wouldn't affect a jump away. "Jump successful," Desai reported, then
turned to look at me. "We emerged within forty meters of the intended
target," she said and shook her head in amazement.  Forty meters! Our best
human-programmed jump was fifty thousand kilometers off target. Our scientists
said the theoretical best that was possible was nine thousand kilometers, that
some kind of quantum uncertainty made it impossible to get any closer, the laws
of physics didn't provide any way to be more accurate. Yet Skippy always got us
within a hundred meters, usually much closer. He said quantum mechanics was
uncertain only if you took into account one layer of spacetime, another thing
that had our science team scratching their heads.

"Congratulations, Skippy, another great
jump," I said.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm amazing the monkeys yet again.
I'll take a bow later. Scanning now. By the way, the jump accuracy was thirty
seven meters, not forty. Hmm, there is really an unusual level of interference
from the magnetic- NO! Pilot get us out of here nownownow!!"

Desai didn't hesitate, her finger had already been
poised on the button to jump away. On the main display I saw the symbol for a
jump point forming, a split second from the ship being pulled into the jump
wormhole it was generating.

Skippy shouted again, "Belay tha-"

Too late. The
Dutchman
jumped. Or tried to. The
whole ship vibrated so badly, it felt like my teeth were going to shake loose.
There was a screeching, screaming, tearing sound like the ship was being torn
apart. The lights and displays flickered, the deck dropped away from me then
slammed me back in the chair, as the artificial gravity cut out and came back
on. There were so many warning symbols flashing on the displays it wasn't worth
me trying to read them, and nothing we could do about it that Skippy wasn't
already taking care of. To my uneducated eyes, instead of jumping far outside
the system we had only done a microjump, the moon we intended to investigate
was still on the corner of the display. "Skippy, what happened?" I
asked, to my credit my voice was calm and only loud enough to be heard over
other people shouting, alarms beeping, and the ship's structure flexing and
groaning with terrifying noises. In the background was the battle stations
alarm from
Star Trek
, which I had forgotten Sergeant Adams had
programmed into the ship’s systems.

"A Thuranin destroyer squadron, five ships and we
jumped in close to them, they got us partly caught in a damping field. Our
attempted jump blew seventeen percent of our drive coils, it would have been
worse but I cut power as we got pulled into the wormhole, the wormhole was
collapsing on us anyway. We should jump again as soon as possible," as he
spoke I noticed the main display showed we had a sixty three percent charge in
the jump drive capacitors, "there will be a delay as I take the burned-out
coils offline and recalibrate the drive."

"How long?"

"I estima- uh, oh, they found us again, two
destroyers just jumped in. They're targeting us with maser beams. And six
missiles."

"Defensive systems on full auto!" I ordered
to the crew in the CIC. The Thuranin computer system that Skippy had upgraded
would have to protect us from the inbound missiles, no way could any human
react fast enough to hit a missile. "Pilot, you know what to do."

"Aye aye," Desai said tightly from the
lefthand seat. As she went to full thrust on the ship's normal-space engines to
dodge the destroyers' particle beams, the ship rocked.

"Particle beam hit." Skippy reported flatly,
as the ship rocked again, harder this time. "Another hit. Shields
compensating."

"Should we shoot back?" I asked. The answer
seemed obvious, I wanted to check with Skippy anyway.

"Affirmative, it will keep those destroyers from
getting closer. The three other destroyers have jumped in, we're surrounded.
They're firing weapons."

"Weapons free," I ordered, and the display
showed our particle beam cannons firing back. "How soon can we jump?"

"Not soon enough, they're projecting a damping
field again," Skippy said. "We're not ready but we don't have a
choice, we need to get out of here before that damping field reaches full
strength. Jump option Echo."

Echo. That was a microjump, Skippy must not have
confidence the ship could handle a bigger distance. That was bad. Those
destroyers would be right on top of us again. "Pilot,” I ordered, “engage
jump option Echo."

This wasn't a fight against low-tech Kristang ships,
this was the
Dutchman
against equivalent technology, against true
warships designed to be in combat. Our star carrier by contrast was a bus, a
high-tech bus but a bus anyway.

It was a nightmare. We jumped and jumped again, trying
to get away. It wasn't working, the destroyers always found us quickly,
sometimes only two, sometimes all five surrounded us and pounded our shields.
Desai did her best to keep the enemy guessing where we were and Skippy said she
was doing a good job, the problem was that the enemy had multiple, data-linked
sensor platforms, and we couldn't dodge their particle beams for more than a
couple seconds before they adjusted aim and hit us again. Our automatic
defenses were knocking missiles out of the sky left and right, each volley of
missiles got closer and closer to us, as our sensors were degraded by flashback
from particle beams impacting our shields.

It wasn't working, with each jump we blew more drive
coils, even when the Thuranin weren't able to get a damping field established,
because Skippy never had time to recalibrate the jump drive, and every time we
lost drive coils the system fell further out of calibration.

It wasn't working, we weren't getting out of this one.
The crew knew it; I could see it on their faces. Shields were strained to the
limit, particle beams were partially bleeding through, they were targeting the
aft engineering section of the ship to hit our reactors and jump drive coils.
Twenty one minutes into the running battle, we lost our first reactor, it was
damaged and Skippy had to shut it down. With that reactor gone, the other five
struggled to power the stealth field, the shields, the particle beams and to
recharge the jump drive capacitors. Without asking me, Skippy had dropped
artificial gravity to one third power and shut down all nonessential systems.

It wasn't working.

The
Flying Dutchman
shuddered again, with
sounds of groaning and the terrifying shriek of metal composites being torn
apart. The displays on the bridge flickered, and the air was filled with alarm
bells and klaxons from almost every system. "Skippy! Get us out of-"

The ship shook violently again. "Direct hit on
Number Four reactor," Skippy announced calmly, "reactor has lost
containment. I am preparing it for ejection. Ejection system is offline. Pilot,
portside thrusters full emergency thrust on my mark."

"Ready," Desai acknowledged in as calm a
voice as she could manage.

"Mark. Go!" Skippy shouted.

Whatever they were doing, it was more than the ship's
already stressed artificial gravity and inertial compensation systems could
handle, normally ship maneuvers were not felt at all by the crew. This time, I
lurched in the command chair and had to hang on, as the ship was flung to the
right. There was a shudder, actually a wave of ripples traveling along the
ship's spine, accompanied by a deep harmonic groaning. No ship should ever make
a sound like that.

"Ah, damn it. Reactor Four is away, it impacted
Reactor Two on the way out, shutting down Two now." Skippy's voice had a
touch of strain to it. "Missiles inbound. Diverting all remaining power to
jump drive capacitors. Hang on, this is going to be close."

The main display indicated the jump drive was at a 38%
charge, Skippy had told us that with the
Dutchman
trapped inside the
Thuranin destroyer squadron's damping field, we needed a 42% charge for even a
short jump, and that still carried a severe risk of rupturing the drive. If
that happened, we would never know it, we'd simply be dead between one
picosecond and another.