SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (33 page)

The remaining scavengers had to be hopping mad by now.
Not only did they now not have any functional aircraft, they had lost the
priceless Elder power tap, lost it to a rival, unknown group of Kristang. A
group that got away cleanly, and was now on its way back to civilization, with
an Elder artifact that was worth more than many habitable planets. The
scavengers were now effectively stuck at their base, with whatever less
valuable Elder trinkets they'd recovered, waiting to be picked up.

If that happened to me, I would sure be hopping mad.
From Skippy tapping into their communications, he reported the scavenger
leaders were swearing vengeance, arguing and fighting amongst themselves, and
generally expending a whole lot of energy uselessly.

Phase Two, I judged, was a complete success.

To avoid utter humiliation at my lack of fitness, I
stopped for a minute in a stream bed near the crashed dropship, hidden from the
SpecOps teams' view, and sucked in air until my pulse stopped racing. The
commander showing up, collapsing on the ground and puking after what should
have been an easy downhill run, was something I very much wanted to avoid. When
my hands stopped shaking, I stepped out of the stream bed, and jogged slowly
toward the smashed dropship. Two dozen or more people were standing around it,
rifles slung over shoulders, the guys in armor suits had their helmets off. They
had gotten a side door open easily, the door frame wasn’t even warped in the
crash, Kristang built their ships tough, that’s for sure. There were four
Kristang bodies laying on the wet grass outside their crashed ship, three of
the bodies were broken and mangled, one appeared to merely be asleep. I looked
away, uncomfortable that these Kristang had died because of a sneak attack on
my orders.

Captain Smythe saw me coming and saluted.
"Colonel, you need to see this, we have a surprise. We're clear here, the
Kristang are all dead."

When we shot down the Luzzard, I had stayed away from
the crashed ship, because it brought back too many bad memories. Memories of
the two Whales my team had shot down on Paradise. Memories of the Chicken that
the Kristang had deliberately crashed there, because the human pilot refused to
fire a missile at a school full of children. I had those memories inside my
head, they haunted me every day, I didn’t need a reminder. That’s why I had
remained away from the crashed Luzzard. Now, I couldn’t avoid seeing the
dropship we had shot down, and Smythe expected me to go inside it. Steeling
myself inwardly, I nodded silently to Smythe and grabbed the door frame with
two hands to pull myself up and into the dropship.

Inside was less of a shambles than I expected, there
was some blood and debris had been thrown around in the violence of the crash.
When I turned to look toward the rear, I got a surprise. "What in the hell
is this?" I asked. The back two thirds of the dropship were stuffed with
some sort of,
thing
. It looked like a big, rounded RV, a long tube
specially designed to fit inside a dropship, it barely cleared the walls and
ceiling. Straps held it securely in place.

"We think it's a vehicle of some kind, sort of a
caravan," Smythe explained, "what you Americans call a Recreational
Vehicle."

Why in the hell had the Kristang brought an RV with
them to Newark? We hadn't seen them loading it into the dropship at their base,
it must have already been in the ship. It seemed like an awful lot of weight to
carry, unless they really needed it. Or maybe they did really need it? An RV
would be useful for driving up the canyon, to recover items from the Luzzard
crash site, and to get the precious Elder power tap. For use on Newark, the RV
would need to be capable of operating over very rough, unimproved terrain. From
satellite images, we hadn't seen evidence that the Kristang had built roads
anywhere, not even around the widely-scattered Elder starship crash site.
Although having an RV would have been a great help in exploring, rather than walking,
or having to fly everywhere. "How does it move? I don't see any
wheels."

Skippy sighed into my zPhone earpiece. "So
impatient, you monkey. You can't see the treads because they're retracted, to
fit inside the dropship. You will need to get the dropship mostly upright,
remove the cargo straps from the RV, and lower the rear ramp, then I'll get it
started and drive it out for you."

The dropship was huge, almost the size of a 737
airliner. It was laying on its side. "How are we supposed to get it
upright? This thing must weigh a couple tons."

"It does. You can rig up cables, and, I really
shouldn't have to remind you dumdums, you have powered armor suits with you,
duh."

Duh was right. I hadn't thought about the armor.

Powered armor did help, we needed to tell people to go
slowly and be careful, as they almost used too much force and flipped the
dropship over on its other side, instead of on its bottom. We gave the dropship
a good ten minutes to settle on its bottom, I didn't want to risk anyone going
inside, until we were sure its structure wasn't going to collapse on us. When I
gave the go ahead, two soldiers went in the side door, and after a few minutes,
the rear ramp cracked open, lowered about halfway, and then got jammed in that
position. It was amazing the thing worked at all, I suppose. After screwing
with it for almost an hour, after which it was still stuck two thirds closed,
we gave up and cut through the lift mechanisms on each side. With the supports
cut through, the ramp crashed down and bounced on the ground, bent a bit but
functional. Next, the team released the straps and latches that held the RV in
place. Once freed, it shifted to slide against the port side of the dropship.
"All right, Skippy, let's see you drive that RV out of there."

There was a whining sound of electric motors. Skippy
had to wiggle it, with a lot of scraping and some tearing sounds, as it slowly
extracted itself from the dropship's distorted fuselage. The RV was
surprisingly intact; dents and scrapes here and there, nothing that prevented
it from running properly. Out of the dropship, we could see its true size, it
was as big as a city bus, or a really large RV. What it ran on was interesting;
it had wheels, but wheels made of treads like a tank. The treads could be
adjusted to be round for speed over good terrain, or oval shaped for crawling
along like a tractor. Skippy said the part of the treads that stuck out for
traction could be retracted, or extended for use in thick mud. Along each side
were inflatable pontoons so the RV could cross rivers, swamps, or even lakes,
there were water jets built into each pontoon for propulsion in water.
"Damn, Skippy, this is a hell of a vehicle," I had to admit.

"Everything you need for a fun-filled family
vacation, Colonel Joe!"

"Yeah, except for a couple sullen teenagers, and
a solid week of rain. And bugs." That's what I recall of many fun-filled
vacations in my family. "Any chance we can drive this thing all the way to
the scavengers' base?"

"Unfortunately, no. The powercells only hold
enough charge to get you about forty percent of the way there."

"Crap. Ah, hey, that's forty percent of the way
that we don't have to walk. Hey, pop the door open, will you, I want to see
inside." We were all eager to see inside our new RV, I went in last, to give
everyone a good look at our prize. It was well-worn, and smelled funky. There
were no frills on the inside; two seats up front, then a dozen more seats that
converted into bunk beds. No kitchen or other provision for cooking, no
bathroom, I suppose the Kristang expected their crew to take care of those
activities outside. In the back was a large, separate bay for cargo, sort of a
garage. It was empty.

Rubbing my chin while looking around the Spartan RV
interior, I asked "We can fit, what, twelve, fourteen people in
here?"

Smythe shook his head, I took that to mean no special
forces soldier would think that way. "To hit that base, against Kristang,
maybe against six sets of powered armor, we need numbers. Two people will be up
front driving and navigating. We can fit twenty passengers back here, rig up
extra seats, I figure we'll be driving through the nights until this thing runs
out of power. Another two people, we can rig up seats in the cargo bay, we
won't be bringing enough gear along to fill it. There's a cargo rack on the
roof, we can set up a tent or some kind of awning up there for protection
against bad weather, we can fit another four people. That gives us twenty
eight. In this terrain, we won't be driving fast, we might be able to have more
guys running alongside it, in shifts."

"No," I shook my head, "last thing we
need is somebody spraining an ankle along the way. I don't want any driving at
night either, too risky. Twenty eight, huh? That evens the odds somewhat. The
more people we bring, the more supplies we need to take with us."

"That is a problem. We can look at some people
going only part of the way, as pack mules, carrying weapons so people going
into the fight only need to carry their weapons part of the way. This is a
logistics problem, sir. We need to think about this, having an RV does solve a
whole lot of problems."

Having an RV helped, we still needed to carefully plan
the logistics. And it wasn’t easy.
Smythe had been working with Simms, and
some problems remained. Serious problems. "Sir, even with the RV getting
us most of the way there, we still have the problem that we can't carry enough
food both to get us to the scavenger base, and back here."

"No,” I said, “but we can lessen the problem, if
we only need enough food to get there," I explained, "and we don't
plan to come back."

"Sir?"

"After the assault, we're not walking all the way
back here, there's no point. And if that Kristang ships shows up early, while we're
walking out in the open, we'll be totally exposed. What we're going to do is,
after the attack, we hole up here," I zoomed the map out and scrolled to
the west of the scavengers' base. "There are caverns here, in these hills.
They're cramped, it's not going to be comfortable. This site is seventy
kilometers west of the scavengers' base, we'll be closer to it on our way in, I
think we may stop there and drop off any supplies we don't need for the
assault. before we launch the attack."

Smythe tapped his iPad, examining the caverns I
mentioned. "That could work. I've holed up in worse places, in the
mountains of Afghanistan. We still won't have enough food. We won't even be
able to carry enough food to get to the scavengers' base, if we're going to be
hauling armor with us."

"That will not be a problem," I said with a
wink. "I know a place that delivers." Tapping the transmit icon on my
zPhone, I called the
Flying
Dutchman
. "Hey, is this Skippy's
pizzeria?"

"Um, Ok, sure, I'll play along." His voice
changed to a stereotypical New York accent. "Yeah, this is Skippy's pizza,
what can I do you for?"

"Do you deliver?"

"Depends. Youze got a coupon or somethin'?"

"Seriously, Skippy, we need a delivery of food
and medical supplies, the first aid stuff we brought from Earth, not the fancy
nano gizmos that we don't know how to use." I explained how we planned to
get to the scavengers' base by driving the RV, then on foot. "By food I
mean sludges, dehydrated, we need maximum nutrition in minimum weight and
volume. Can you send a couple shipments down to us?"

"Oh, sure, no problem, it's not like I'm busy.
You moron! I'm building a freakin' starship out of moondust up here!"

"I know you're extremely busy. We can't carry
enough food with us to reach the scavengers' base, not with all the weapons and
gear we need for the assault. Can you put together something simple, to drop
supplies to us? It will have to be capable of a soft landing, oh, and it has to
stay out of sight of the Kristang here. We can't have them seeing a contrail
coming in, or parachutes."

"Simple? Something simple, to fly all the way
across a star system, enter the atmosphere without leaving a contrail the
Kristang could see, and land a package without damaging it? Simple, he
says."

"Uh huh, yeah. Can you do that? We don't need the
first shipment today, we'll need it probably a couple days, maybe a week before
we reach their base, I sent our timeline to you."

"I'm supposed to drop everything I'm doing up
here," Skippy complained, "to design, test and build a drone delivery
system, from nothing."

"It's kind of important, Skippy. Unless, you
know, you don't want us to recover that AI for you. Or you have a better
idea."

"Damn it. I've been trying to think up a better
idea while you've been blabbering on and on, and, no, I don't have a better
idea. Crap. All right, fine, yes, I can put something together to deliver
supplies to you. Maybe I'll get lucky, and it will land on your stupid monkey
head."

"Excellent! Knew I could count on you,
Skippy."

"All I can say is, there better be a
huge
freakin' tip for this delivery."

"Yup," I decided to push my luck. "If
the delivery is late, do we get it for free?"

With the food situation temporarily solved by Skippy’s
Pizzeria, we turned our attention to other logistical issues. "Captain Smythe,”
I said, “I need you to plan the route from here to the scavenger base,
especially the route for driving the RV."

"Skippy already mapped out the fastest
route," he tapped his iPad, and the screen showed Skippy's suggested
route. "Also two alternatives," two more lines appeared on the
screen, "one slightly shorter, and one that stretches out the caravan's
power to get us the furthest, before we have to get out and walk." Being
British, he called our salvaged vehicle a 'caravan' instead of the American
term 'RV'.

"Smythe," I said, "I'm sure Skippy has
mapped out mathematically perfect routes, and we can't hope to improve on that.
However, I know that little shithead beer can, and one variable he won't
include in the billions of calculations he ran, is anything practical. Fastest,
shortest, and, uh, stretchiest are all fine, in theory. What we need is the
route that gets us to the scavenger base by the target date, with the least
risk. For example, on this route here," I tapped the shortest line,
"Skippy takes us straight through this big swamp. Sure, the RV can
supposedly crawl, or swim, through a swamp. What happens if a tread gets stuck,
or a pontoon gets punctured, or a motor burns out, and the RV is stuck in a
swamp? Then we might have to walk out of the swamp, carrying all our gear, in
freezing cold water over our heads. We can't take that risk. Skippy won't take
that sort of possibility into account. He also won't consider that we're
inexperienced drivers, so he may plan a route that takes us along a narrow
cliff. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," Smythe said, looking chastened.

Wow. For the first time, I felt like a real officer.

Smythe called me over the next morning, he pinged me
while I was helping Simms load supplies into the RV. I took a welcome break and
went into the cavern to where Smythe was working in a tent. A heated tent. It
felt good to step inside and unzip my jacket. "What do you have,
Captain?" I asked.

"Several possible routes for us to reach the
scavengers' base within 30 days, with minimal risk, we think." He pulled
up the first of three routes on his iPad, and explained how the route avoided,
as much as possible, swamps, driving across mushy ice fields, and steep terrain
where the RV might slide down or tip over. "After we cross this river, we
should have enough power left to get here, these grasslands are relatively flat
and dry. We'll have to walk from there, the good news is we'll only need to
detour forty kilometers to go around this swamp, and once we're past that, it's
a straight shot, and, well, Bob's your uncle, we're there."

"Bob's my uncle?" Neither of my three uncles
was named 'Bob'.

Smythe chuckled. "It's an expression, sir, it
means it's easy."

"Oh. Bob's your uncle, huh?"

"Yes, sir."

"Show me the other alternatives." He did.
Each of the three possible routes had advantages; the first didn't get as far
before the RV ran out of power, its advantage is the walking part was over easy
terrain. The second route stretched out the RV's powercells to cover the
maximum distance, minimizing the distance we would have to walk, however, the
walking route went through a region of hills and one swampy area. And the third
route took the absolutely safest path for the RV, minimizing the possibility it
would get stuck somewhere, and the walk would be through relatively flat, easy
terrain, the disadvantage was the walking section of the route was the longest
of the three alternatives. "Hmm, all the routes require we cross these
three rivers?"

"Yes, there's no way around them,
literally," Smythe explained. "We've mapped the easiest crossings we
can get to along the route, where the river current is slowest. Here for
example," he pointed to the first river crossing, which was the same on
all three alternatives, the three routes diverged after that. "If we cross
up here instead, the river is only half as wide, however, your chap Skippy
tells me the current is more than twice as fast in this area, and there are
large rocks just under the surface. Down here, where we plan to cross, the current
is more manageable, and the river bottom is sand, there are no underwater
obstacles the caravan could get stuck on."

I nodded. "Makes sense. Good work."

"The sticky point is that last river. This nasty
bugger here," he tapped the iPad screen for emphasis, "is going to be
a problem. The glacier that feeds this river is breaking up quickly, there are
large chunks of ice floating in the river, we'll need to steer around them. The
river channel is narrow almost the whole way down to the sea, it would be
hundreds of kilometers out of our way to find an easier crossing. And the river
banks are steep. The only place we can see for a crossing is here. The bank on
the far side is less than half a meter tall, Skippy tells us the caravan treads
can climb that easily, and by the time we get there, with the summer coming on,
the river level should be higher as the glacier melt accelerates. The bank is
steep on this side, we'll need to create a ramp down into it, lots of work with
picks and shovels, nothing the lads can't handle."

He made it sound easy. Maybe to SpecOps types, hacking
out a ramp large enough for an RV to drive down was a fun couple hours in the
great outdoors. Right then, I had an idea. "Captain, we can use armor to
clear a ramp. With those suits, it won't take long at all."

"Do we want to use the suits for this, sir? We'd
need to recharge the suits' powercells from the caravan, that will drain the
caravan faster."

Not such a good idea after all. I was still thinking
of what was now the good old days, when we had nearly unlimited power from the
Dutchman's
reactors. That mindset needed to change, fast, before I made a stupid mistake
and got people killed. "You're right. Sore muscles are a problem we can
deal with, more easily than draining power from the RV. We need to be very
careful with the RV's powercells. Route Two, I think, is out, I don't want us
walking through those hills. The extra gravity, the low oxygen level, and the
heavy loads we'll be carrying will make the hike tough enough already. Route
Three you say is the least risk for the RV, but the walk is longer, how much
longer?"

"An additional sixty kilometers, roughly a day
and a half, sir." He didn't point out that information was clearly
displayed on the side of the map, I should have noticed that.

Sixty kilometers, was, to Captain Smythe of the
British Special Air Services, a trek of a mere day and a half. He was assuming
we would be walking forty kilometers, or twenty seven miles per day. Walking
twenty seven miles each day, with heavily overloaded packs, in gravity fourteen
percent greater than we were used to on Earth. "Sixty klicks in a day and
a half? You're not being a bit too ambitious, Captain?"

"No, sir, don't worry sir, the lads can handle
it. We'll check in every two hours, and you can track our progress through the
satellite."

"I'll be tracking your progress closer than that,
Captain. I'm going with you."

"Sir?" He asked, surprised.

"I know I'm not one of you SpecOps people, but I
can handle a walk. There may be crucial decisions to be made, real-time, when
we raid the scavenger's base, I need to be there, right there."

Smythe avoided my eyes. "Sir-"

"Why else do you think I've been busting my ass
training with you? I'm going along. Don't worry, I'll stay out of your way
during the assault. We're also bringing two civilians with us, doctors, medical
doctors."

"Sir?" Smythe's face revealed his anguish.
Three of his precious twenty eight billets would be taken up by noncombatants,
that reduced his striking power to only twenty five. It was bad enough that I
would be going with them, Smythe having to deal with his commanding officer
looking over his shoulder and second guessing him in real time. At least I was
a soldier, and had been in combat. Including killing a Kristang warrior with my
bare hands, or at least, with the butt of a rifle. Bringing two civilians along
would be nothing but a headache for him. "We have qualified medics."
His roster of twenty eight SpecOps troops included four people with medic
certification, in addition to the battlefield first aid training that all
special forces soldiers had taken.

"Qualified medics, yes. These two doctors are
experienced surgeons, they both did a tour with Doctors Without Borders,
they've operated in primitive field conditions. This is not open for
discussion, Captain, I am not going into combat against Kristang without means
to keep wounded people alive, until we can get them back to the Thuranin medical
facility aboard the
Dutchman
."

"Yes, sir," he said tightly.

I could tell he thought I was endangering the primary
mission, assaulting the Kristang, in favor of a dubious secondary objective. In
combat against Kristang, both sides having equivalent technology, wounds were
very likely to be fatal, any medical assistance might well be a useless waste
of resources. It may have been my lack of experience as a senior commander that
caused me to bring two civilians along, a real colonel may have looked at the problem
more objectively, been more coldly calculating about the lives of his soldiers.
That wasn't me. Also, I figured that if needed, I could fight, and if two less
soldiers were the difference between success and failure, then this entire
mission was far too much risk, and I should call the whole thing off right now.
"The two doctors, X and Y, have been running and marching with us, you've
met them."