SpecOps (Expeditionary Force Book 2) (4 page)

"Yup, you did," Skippy added cheerily.
"And the third guy they offered the assignment to also refused their
condition, so they went back to you, and dropped their idiot idea of planning a
mutiny. That's why, technically, you are the fourth choice to command the SEAL
team."

Williams looked back to me. "I didn't know that,
sir. I think the mutiny idea was something DIA, and I suspect CIA,
wanted."

"I appreciate that you didn't come aboard
intending to take over my ship, Lieutenant." My ship. I was now thinking
of the
Flying
Dutchman
as mine. When had that happened?

"I can't promise that no one else has that idea.
We have four other militaries aboard. And I can't vouch for the Ranger team,
either, sir."

"You make a very good point, Lieutenant Williams,"
Skippy said. "Colonel Joe, perhaps I should make an announcement over the
intercom, and create a demonstration of what will happen, if any idiot troop of
monkeys tries to take over the ship. How about I close and lock all the doors
on the ship, and shut off the ventilation? Oooh, and I can kill the artificial
gravity also, that will slow down any mutineers."

"Skippy, you can't do that."

"Huh? Clearly, I can, Joe. Oh, sure, I get it,
you're right, I'll leave ventilation and gravity on in the bridge and CIC
compartments."

"That's not my point, Skippy! You can't, let me
say this a different way, you should not do anything like that. If there is a
plan for mutiny, I need to handle that myself. Having a shiny beer can do the
work for me only makes me look weak, as a commander. I don't need any help
here, Skippy, this is something you need to keep out of."

"You sure about this, Joe?"

"Hundred percent. You know about sciency stuff, I
know monkeys, damn it, I mean, I know humans, people. Stay out of this."

Skippy paused. "I'll make you a deal, Colonel
Joe. I will stay out of this, unless there is an actual attempted mutiny. If
that happens, certain monkeys are going to find out real quick that I am not
always a friendly little shiny beer can. Anybody screws with me, they will
seriously regret it. Ask the former Thuranin crew of this ship, if they have
any questions about that."

"We get your point, Skippy. Loud and clear."
A potential mutiny is a subject that I needed to discuss with my command team;
Chang, Simms and Adams. The entire idea of anyone trying to forcefully take
over the ship is idiotic; without Skippy's cooperation, the ship was never
getting home. "Williams, it is not my intention for Sergeant Adams to
interfere with how you train your SEAL team, she will remain in charge of
overall training. You and your team may have studied how to use armored suits
and combots, you have no experience with them even in training. Bring your team
to the training hold at 1300 hours, and I'll show you what I mean."

Arranged along one wall, or I guess aboard a ship I
should have called it a bulkhead, were ten Kristang powered armor suits, there
were more of them in another compartment. We'd taken forty six suits from the
Kristang troopship in Earth orbit, they weren't all in good condition, so out
of the forty six units, we had forty two that were operational. The good news
is that the troopship had equipment for modifying suits, we now had that
equipment aboard the
Flying
Dutchman
, and we'd been able to
adjust most of the suits so that normal sized humans, anyone above five feet
six in height, could use a suit. There hadn't been a whole lot of extra time
before we departed Earth orbit, so I didn't have a whole lot of experience with
the new suits, I did have way more experience than any of the new crew.

In addition to powered armor suits, the Kristang
troopship had provided us with plenty of rifles, ammo, and Zinger antiaircraft
missiles. Except for Thuranin combots, we were equipped almost entirely with
Kristang military gear, including zPhones for everyone, and night vision gear.
The food, of course, all came from Earth.

When I arrived at the large cargo hold we used for
training, it was 1250 hours, and both Adams and Williams were already suited up
in armor, with only their faceplates open. In the military, if you weren't
early, you were late, so of course Williams and his SEAL team had gotten there
half an hour early. Along with Adams was Giraud, the French paratrooper leader
was checking Williams' suit and explaining its features. On the other side of
the cargo hold, Adams was going through exercises; bending over, easily jumping
to touch the ceiling that was ten meters high, and spinning her unloaded
Kristang rifle like it was a baton and she was a drum majorette. Generally, she
was showing off, I figured she was doing it to intimidate Williams, and from
the look on his face, it may have been working.

Adams and Giraud showed Williams how the armor suit
worked, and he went through a series of familiarization exercises. He was good,
damn good, he caught on much faster than I had back when I put on a suit for
the first time. When Adams and Giraud were satisfied that Williams knew enough
not to hurt himself, it was time for the show. There was a large circle painted
on the floor, Adams announced that the object of the game was like sumo
wrestling, whoever knocked their opponent out of the circle won the match. They
took positions opposite each other, toes touching the painted circle, and
Giraud announced "Begin!"

Williams, knowing Adams had more experience with
powered armor, crouched slightly, then launched himself forward. He wasn't
going to attempt any advanced hand to hand combat, he was going to rely on the
suit's speed, power and mass to knock Adams out of the circle.

Adams had a different idea. She stood in place, but as
soon as Williams moved forward, a door in the bulkhead behind Adams slammed
open, and a combot launched itself across the hold. The combot's feet never
touched the floor, it flew through the air in the blink of an eye, crashing
into Williams, knocking him to go skidding across deck. He struggled against
the combot, but the Kristang powered armor was no match for the superior
technology of a Thuranin combot. Standing in place and controlling the combot through
gestures, Adams had the combot gently but firmly pick Williams up like a rag
doll and held him against the far bulkhead.

"Enough!" Giraud declared, and Adams
gestured for the combot to release Williams.

Williams popped his faceplate open, looked at Adams,
and bowed. "Well played, Sergeant. You did warn me to expect the
unexpected out here."

"Everything is unexpected out here," I said.
"Do you have any questions, Lieutenant?"

To his credit, Williams wasn't insulted, he wasn't
angry, he had an enormous grin. Getting familiar with powered armor, and
combots, was going to be a bigger challenge than he thought. And special forces
people absolutely
love
challenges. "No questions at all,
Colonel," he said to me. To his team, he added, "People, this is
going to be fun, so pay attention."

I stayed in the training hold for an hour, taking the
opportunity to gain time in a powered suit myself, it had been weeks since I'd
used one. Fortunately, it quickly became familiar again, and I followed along
with the SEAL team as Adams and Giraud put them through a series of exercises.
It was good, I told myself, for the SEALs to see their commander knew what he
was doing. The truth is, I was showing off, and I didn't care who knew it.
Adams caught my eye a couple times, like when I jumped, touched the ceiling,
did a backflip on the way down, and landed perfectly on my feet. That wasn't
all skill, the suit's sensors detected the floor, and would have pulled me
upright to land safely if I hadn't managed to do it on my own. After an hour of
fun, I had to get out of the suit and leave, because my duty shift on the
bridge started in two hours, and I wanted to grab a snack before then.

Out in the corridor, I put my zPhone earpiece in.
"Hey, Skippy, you call me Colonel Joe, you call Simms 'Major Tammy'. You
call Chang 'Colonel Kong'," Kong was his given name, "or King
Kong." Chang actually enjoyed being called 'King Kong', that nickname had
totally backfired on Skippy. "You call Lt. Williams 'Baldilocks'. You have
some sort of nickname for most people. But you only ever call Sergeant Adams,
'Sergeant Adams.' Why is that? Her first name is Margaret, why don't you call
her Meg, or Peggy, or, hey, how about you call her Sarge Marge?"

"Wow. I am impressed. I thought I'd seen the
depths of your stupidity before, but you're setting a new record low for
dumdumness. You have met Sergeant Adams, right?"

"Duh, I met her before I met you. Oh, that was a
rhetorical question."

"Double duh. Sarge Marge, huh? Tell me, what do
you think would happen if I referred to Sergeant Adams by that quaint
nickname?"

"Um, she'd kick your ass?"

"Most likely. I seek fun, Joe, not suicide."

"Ok, good talk, then."

"Uh huh, sure. Hey, I noticed you showing off big
time in the training hold."

"Commander's privilege, Skippy. Besides, I do
need to maintain proficiency with powered armor."

"Why? You're the commander, you should remain
aboard the ship."

"No way. No way am I staying here all the time,
Skippy. And are you absolutely certain there is no possibility that I will
never need to use a suit, out here?"

He sighed. "No, I can't say that for certain,
Joe. Fine, you have fun, just don't hurt yourself. I won't always be there to
protect you when you do something stupid."

"Got it, Skippy, thanks."

After leaving the now-dormant wormhole behind, we had
set course for another wormhole. Not the next closest wormhole, unfortunately
the closest wormhole connected in the wrong direction from where we wanted to
go. Despite Skippy's joke about setting course for a random blue star, we did
have a particular destination planned. We made several Skippy-programmed jumps,
then when we were in the middle of empty interstellar space, we programmed our
own jump into the nav system by humans, our very first. My main hope for our
first jump was that we didn't blow up the ship.

I checked the main bridge display for the vital
details of ship status, although I could see the same data anywhere on the ship
with my iPad, it felt more real when I was sitting in the command chair on the
bridge. The very bottom left corner of the display now had, in small script,
the designator '
UNS
Flying
Dutchman
'. Skippy must have
added that while I wasn't paying attention. The same letters, much larger, were
on a new brass plaque above the door to the bridge and CIC compartments. The
crew, including me, liked that, it made us sound official.

The governments that made up UN Expeditionary Forces
Command suddenly decided, a few days before we departed, that they didn't like
the name
Flying
Dutchman
, and various other names were floated
for consideration. I got the feeling their public relations people would have
liked to run a worldwide naming contest on the internet, if they'd had time,
and if the nature of the big star carrier hanging in orbit wasn't classified.
Navy officers around the world protested that changing a ship's name was
traditionally bad luck. Skippy cut the argument short by stating that he liked
the name
Flying
Dutchman,
that he controlled all data systems
aboard the ship, and that the UN could name our captured alien star carrier the
Good
Ship
Lollipop
for all he cared, it wouldn't change
anything. In the frantic days before departure, trying to get the ship loaded
with all the people, gear and supplies we needed, I had no time for BS like
caring what we called the ship. To our Merry Band of Pirates, it was always
going to be the '
Flying
Dutchman
' anyway. When UNEF dropped the
renaming idea, that was one less headache for me.

Back home, I am sure the UN still has an international
committee of highly-paid people studying the issue of our ship’s name. Don't
worry, they will issue a report long before Earth's sun explodes. Probably.

"Jump complete." Desai announced from the
pilot's seat.

"Are we clear, Skippy? No unfriendlies in the
area?" I asked.

"You tell me. You say you need to be able to fly
this ship on your own, so look at the sensors yourself," Skippy said in a
peevish tone.

I wasn't going to argue with him, he was mostly right.
The cold hard truth was that we did not need to be able to fly the ship on our
own, what we did need was some sliver of hope that we might be able to fly the
Dutchman
on our own, after Skippy left us. Clinging to that tiny bit of hope was the
difference between a high risk mission, and a suicide mission. The crew,
including myself, had signed up for a high risk mission. Super high risk,
admittedly. Risk of the if-
anything
-goes-wrong-we-are-totally-screwed
level. "Pilot?"

Desai answered more slowly than was optimal, and she
knew it. "We jumped to the right place, within, seven hundred, yes, seven
hundred thousand kilometers." The tone of her voice was not filled with
confidence. She let out a breath she'd been holding in. "Yes. Confirmed.
Jump was successful," she turned in her chair to look at me, and gave me a
thumb's up, with a weak smile. Desai had programmed the jump herself, this was
the first jump Skippy had not loaded into the autopilot for us. Skippy had
grumbled and complained loudly at the delay, then refused to check the numbers
for us. "All I'll tell you is, you won't be jumping us into a star,"
is what he had said.

His grumbling about a delay was understandable, Desai
had programmed the jump into the computer yesterday, and we'd then spent the
intervening time checking that the programming was correct. Three different
teams of pilots and scientists had checked the programming, and that was after
two days of analysis to decide what should be programmed into the Thuranin
navigation computer. Skippy reluctantly had restored the original Thuranin
operating system to the navigation system, running it parallel to his own
access, making snarky comments about it the whole time. It wasn't the true
original operating system, the Thuranin ship AI, it was a dumbed-down version
that allowed humans access, and was simple enough for us to use. Skippy
cautioned that if there was a glitch in the system, after he left us, we would
have no way to debug or fix it. To which I had responded that, if there was a
glitch anywhere in the navigation system software, that could only be Skippy's
fault, for screwing up the programming, or missing something. That insulted his
boundless ego enough for him to declare the software perfect, better than
perfect, for he had loaded in his own maintenance and repair subroutine into
it. I never let on that I'd played him, so I could use that particular trick
again.

"Sensors?" I called out to the people
manning the consoles in the Combat Information Center, beyond the glass-like
diamond composite bridge walls.

"Nothing, uh, nothing on the scopes. That we can
detect, sir," came the answer.

That wasn't reassuring. Without Skippy controlling the
data feeds, the bridge and CIC displays didn't contain the helpful color coding
designation for Thuranin, Maxohlx, Jeraptha, Kristang, Ruhar and unknown ships.
No matter in this case, there was absolutely nothing on the scopes within a
quarter lightyear. We'd deliberately jumped from the middle of nowhere to the
middle of nowhere, and we'd only jumped the distance from Earth's Sun to
Jupiter, a small test for a first jump. If there had been anything dangerous in
the area, Skippy would have told us, he was unhappy, not suicidal.

We had jumped only a short distance, and still missed
the mark by over half a million kilometers. No way could we jump anywhere near
a planet with that lousy accuracy, we needed to get better, a lot better, or
the
Dutchman
would be spending a lot of time crawling through normal
space. And we didn't have the time, or fuel, for that. We also had a limited
supply of fixings for critical cheeseburgers in the galley. Our first jump
wasn't an acceptable effort; the crew knew it. "The ship didn't
explode," I observed, "we didn't break the jump drive, and we didn't
emerge in the middle of a planet, or next to a Thuranin battlegroup. Good
enough for a first jump. We'll debrief tomorrow morning. In the meantime,
Skippy, can you program the next jump? We need to get moving."

"Whoa, whoa, slow down, monkeys. Have you
analyzed the jump drive system? Are the coils calibrated and ready for another
jump?"

"Pilot?" I asked. The drive charge indicator
on the bottom of the main display read 87%. Good for several regular jumps, or
one really long jump, with the magical modifications Skippy had made to the
Thuranin's crappy jump drive.

"It looks like it is Ok?" Desai answered
slowly.

"It looks like it's Ok?" Skippy scoffed.
"Ok? Such a precise term, I am completely impressed by your
professionalism. Consider that if it's not 'Ok', as you say, another jump could
rupture spacetime and destroy the aft part of the ship, leaving us stranded
here in interstellar space. Forever. By 'us', I mean me, because you air
breathers will be out of luck, once the backup power fails. Yup, I'll be here,
alone, surrounded by the dry, dusty corpses of monkeys. My only hope then will
be that, in four billion years, the collision of the Andromeda galaxy with the
Milky Way will throw some solar system's orbit to intersect with wherever I'm
drifting at the time. Considering that, I'll ask again; and I'll speak slowly
this time. Is the jump drive ready for another jump?"

"You made your point, Skippy." I said with a
touch of anger, I didn't appreciate him bullying Desai. "How about this,
Mister Smartass; you need to show us how to analyze the status of the jump
drive. We're not doing that now, unless you want another delay. Is the jump
drive ready?

"Of course it is. You never let me have any
fun."

"You can find some type of fun that doesn't
involve talking about the ship exploding. Program the autopilot for another
jump, and let's get moving. Also, put together a briefing for us tomorrow,
about what we did wrong, and right, with that last jump."

"Aye, aye, Captain. You will be dazzled by the
brilliance of my PowerPoint slides."

When we left the now-dormant wormhole near Earth,
Skippy had programmed a course to bring us to an abandoned Kristang space
station. The Kristang had built a space station in orbit around the innermost
planet of a red dwarf star, not because the planet or the star were in any way
interesting. What was interesting were the shattered remains of an Elder
starship in orbit around the innermost planet, a treasure trove well worth the
expense of the Kristang building and maintaining a space station to establish a
permanent presence there. Sometime around three hundred years ago, there had
been a fight between the Kristang there, or a rival clan had raided the
station, because a major battle had damaged the station badly enough for the
place to be abandoned ever since.

The abandoned space station was both the closest, and
easiest, site for us to investigate. Closest, because of the roundabout journey
we had to take through multiple wormholes, still meant we wouldn't reach the
first site for thirty eight days. Thirty eight dull, boring days cruising
through isolated interstellar space, jumping, recharging engines, jumping
again. And occasionally transiting wormholes.

The first two weeks after leaving Earth behind were
reasonably stimulating, with our new merry band of pirates getting used to
being in space, being aboard a starship, being aboard a captured alien
starship. Setting up a training routine kept people interested, which was
critical for keeping special forces types sharp and focused. The first two
weeks included a first-time jump for most of the crew, their first wormhole
transit, a lot of first things. Firsts were good, firsts were interesting,
firsts held people's attention and kept them from getting bored.

Then the tedium set in. Even the pilots, the only
people aboard who needed to actually do anything other than eat, exercise and
sleep, got bored with their regular duties. Mostly the pilot duty consisted of
waiting for jump engines to recharge, Skippy to program a jump into the
autopilot, and the chief pilot on duty pressing a button. There was always at
least a little tension following a jump, when the
Dutchman's
sensor net
determined whether there were other ships around. The crew on duty in the CIC
scanned the sensors, the two pilots had fingers poised next to buttons for
triggering a preprogrammed emergency jump away. Then, when nothing was
detected, after five minutes the All Clear signal was given, and everyone went
back to the tedium of routine.

The pilots spent most of their time, unless they were
sleeping, but often including while eating and running on a treadmill in the
gym, learning how to fly first our Thuranin star carrier, then our beat-up
Kristang frigate and finally Thuranin dropships. One of our new pilots, a
hotshot French flyboy who came to the
Dutchman
from serving as a test
pilot for the Rafael fighter, told me the training was beyond tough, it was
crushing, impossible. And he was one of Desai's best students. I told him that
Captain Desai had flown a dropship, then a frigate then a star carrier, with
zero training, in combat. The guy did have a point, I talked to Desai and
Skippy about adjusting the tempo of the flight training. After the first two
weeks, the new pilots adjusted to drinking from the fire hose. Desai started
sleeping more than four hours a night.

Boredom was bad for regular people. Boredom for
gung-ho elite SpecOps people could be deadly. The third week of our pleasure
cruise, two Indian paratroopers suffered broken bones in a training accident.
Thanks to Doctor Skippy's magical use of Thuranin medical technology, their
broken bones would heal fully in two weeks, unfortunately they couldn't resume
normal training until they were fully healed. When we arrived at our first
target, those two paratroopers would be unable to join their fellows in any
action, they'd either be staying aboard the
Dutchman
, or operating
combots.

I went to the ship's sickbay, nobody wanted to call it
an 'infirmary', as that implied a special forces soldier could be infirm. Which
was unsat. The two mildly chagrined paratroopers were sitting on the too-small Thuranin
beds, not actually beds, they were some sort of form-fitting gel. Both already
had their broken legs encased in hard sleeves, with thin tubes connected to the
beds. The tubes provided nutrients, and nano machines that knitted the bones
and tissues back together, all controlled by Dr. Skippy the mad scientist. Both
of the injured men were eager to get mobile as soon as possible, of course, I'd
already talked to Skippy to assure he didn't release them from sickbay until
they weren't likely to further injure themselves by overdoing their rehab
exercises. Sickbay was crowded, with me, the two injured men, and six
scientists, who were trying to understand the Thuranin technology Skippy was
using.